Social media disruptive change in healthcare:responses of healthcare providers

Social media represent specific types of technologies that are end-user driven and end-users are able to drive disruptive change giving little time to organizations to react. With rapid and powerful emergence of social media communities in healthcare, this sector is faced with new and alternative avenues to the traditional healthcare provision. These are offered from both firm-hosted and patient-hosted social media health communities. But, what are the effects of these developments on the healthcare providers and how do they react to different social media disruptive changes? To address these important questions, we draw on the disruptive innovation and information processing perspectives to explore the effects of social media disruptive change on business models, strategic responses and social media strategies of healthcare providers. We conceptualize social media as disruptive innovation and explore yet unknown differences in effects from firm-hosted and patient-hosted social mediahealth communities. In this way, we address recent calls for research on social media and business models as well as go beyond traditional topics in healthcare information systems (IS) research, which were focused on privacy, interoperability and resistance to change. We plan to conduct our researchthrough survey of healthcare providers in different healthcare systems.