Chapter 1: Introduction

Health being the most sought attribute of life, it demands continuous innovations and improvements in its delivery and service approaches. Remaining up-to-date with all advanced procedures and producing paramount user-centric service is central for healthcare service providers. To meet the dynamicity of medical information, they continuously need to learn and adopt best practices. The online community plays a major role in supporting the continual development process of healthcare professionals as it helps them to stay updated and proficient of latest practices. It has been progressively utilized for gaining from specialists, distributing health information, examining operational administration challenges and clinical issues. According to available researches, online forums practically assist healthcare stakeholders with virtual communication practices for seamless collaboration to share, discuss, decide and incorporate various assessments to implement result-based conclusions (Ikioda et al., 2013). On the other hand, this collaborative approach helps the service providers to actively get connected with end users, seek improvement feedbacks, deliver user-centric services and acquire maximum customer satisfaction.