Online Healthcare Practices and Associated Stakeholders: Review of Literature for Future Research Agenda

The rise of online platforms for health information exchange is changing the traditional healthcare delivery practices. With Internet technologies, online healthcare practices are continuously growing through their diversified delivery functionalities with better and faster reachability. Participants use such forums for various purposes, for instance, to gather information, seek medical assistance, connect with other users, and purchase healthcare products or services. The need for a consolidated study, considering all key aspects of virtual healthcare, is crucial. We aim to examine the existing literature to study stakeholders of online healthcare and their behaviour dynamics, available functionalities and service delivery approaches during different phases. We have identified five key stakeholders who are vital for online healthcare deliveries and explored their contributions across life-cycle stages of online healthcare community (OHC) in India. The PRISMA reporting approach was used to select suitable literature for this study. About 78 articles were identified, which were shortlisted to 67 articles, keeping in mind the objectives of this study. Key findings from all these articles are segregated according to identified themes and systematically presented to enlarge the visibilities of associated functionalities. This study is one of the initial studies on India’s OHC that has defined associated stakeholders, functionalities and association dynamics during different life-cycle phases. People are proactively emerging towards OHC to acquire knowledge, share experience and decide their healthcare drives. Being operated virtually, information technology (IT) is the driving factor of OHC, and we have addressed the diversified IT aspects applicable in an OHC set-up. We also have accumulated all key attributes of OHC and produced a theoretical framework through this study, which academic researchers can use to understand the present approaches better and derive futuristic studies. Similarly, service providers can use the findings to evaluate their services, identify the present loopholes in the operational approaches and effectively manage the deliverables to meet end-user needs.