Designing role of online health educators in healthcare services

Web technology provides healthcare organizations the ability to broaden services beyond usual practices, and thus provides a particularly advantageous environment to achieve complex e-health goals. Furthermore, introducing web technology in healthcare services may add value to the overall healthcare process. Web technology helps healthcare organizations to extend the online health services (e-health) beyond their traditional mechanism. The changes enable customers (patients) to participate more in the process of healthcare, such as through their ability to generate personal health data to their personalized web-based interface. It allows patients to have greater control of information flow between healthcare organizations and customers, and among customers themselves. In this study the authors investigate the extended role of healthcare staff that provide e-health services. The authors have developed e-health models that accommodate customers' participation to engage more actively in the healthcare system. Through the model the authors developed a prototype--namely Clinic 2.0. Clinic 2.0 is set up to facilitate interactions between healthcare providers and customers. In the proposed systems, the authors introduced Online Health Educator (OHE)--a healthcare staff that is specifically responsible for administering Clinic 2.0. The authors have conducted a survey in Indonesia to draw the expectation of participants regarding the important role of OHE in Clinic 2.0 through a semi-structured interview conducted with participants to further investigate the pivotal roles of OHE. The authors found that e-health services need OHE to achieve customers' satisfaction.