Empowering clients through e-Health in healthcare services: case Brunei

The adoption of Web 2.0 in many business sectors is increasing because it offers the ability for customers to have a greater control in generating contents to their personalized web. Customers are empowered in the sense of controlling the process of interaction(s) between a firm with its customers, and among customers themselves. However, providing empowerment in any state of interaction levels to customers (patients) in a healthcare organization is challenging. Many healthcare organizations have adopted empowerment in their e-health scenario; therefore, it needs a mechanism to measure at which level they have implemented empowerment within their organizations. This article proposes three layers of customers' empowerment in e-health systems based on a reference model called Personal Health Cycle (PHC). The layers of empowerment are personal, social, and medical layers respectively. The modular approach is used to simplify healthcare organizations identifying which modules to be adopted in implementing a strategy for customers' empowerment. The model is derived based on recent studies of empowerment in healthcare organizations. A survey also has been conducted in Brunei Darussalam (Brunei) to verify and improve our initial model and to understand the responses of people regarding empowerment in the e-health services. Questions for the survey are derived from the features of the PHC. The respondents reacted positively to the features of empowerment proposed. We use PHC to define and distinguish electronic health record (EHR) from electronic medical record (EMR).