Technology and health services marketing in Africa

Service quality improvement is perceived as an approach to achieving better outcomes for consumers, and a means for achieving increased patronage, competitive advantage and long-term profitability; it is currently at the forefront of professional, political, managerial and healthcare concerns. In this chapter, we explore how technology is impacting developments in the African health care sector; with a keen focus on health service quality, which has become an important corporate strategy for marketing in healthcare organizations. We also highlights some current challenges facing the health sector in Africa, and how entrepreneurs in some of these countries are innovatively overcoming some of these obstacles mainly by low-cost solutions and strategies. However, while health care marketing has been developing significantly recently, measurement challenges still abound in assessing its impact. From the vantage point that the quality of medical care has customarily been measured by objective criteria; the chapter argues that more subjective valuations are needed. Alongside, in a bid to move quality assessment in the sector beyond the supply side approach, the digitisation and mobilisation of healthcare is discussed through m-health initiatives. Due to the rapid proliferation of mobile devices and online access in the African region, the potential of such technologies from both the demand and supply side encompass healthcare mobile usage. To address, we recommend that for healthcare marketers to stay competitive, there is a both a need for the integration of immersive technology and the implementation of measurement metrics that involve subjective valuations. Both are critical to improving service quality - which has a significant impact on service satisfaction and behavioural intentions; and further mediates the relationship between the dimensions (interpersonal quality, technical quality, environment quality, and administrative quality) and intentions.