Mobile messaging in floating appointments: Cutting queues and personalising patient care

It is well known that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) improve productivity when they are combined to complementary inputs such as work process changes. However, it is not so well known, how these improvements are created and applied in a health care sector, because the performance of communication processes inside knowledge work has not been studied much. It has been said that a patient-focused government agenda and the external world of technology should engage with both the emotional as well as the rationale role in people´s lives. In this paper we analyze a typical productivity improvement case, when mobile messaging is deployed to reach a customer just at a convenient time for her. Both process performance and activity based cost analysis are integrated in the models. The productivity improvements are created as a result of customer process changes enabled by the service processes. The formal model has been tested in a practical example case, where the modeled improvements have been verified and the key personnel have been observed and interviewed. The three research questions are: (i) What are those tangible factors/bottlenecks of the work process which may have negative effects on the services´ outcomes, (ii) how do they affect on productivity and quality and (iii) what role would ICT play in providing these services in the future.