Abstract:
Healthcare organizations are increasingly faced with improvement in service provision and developing strategies to provide convenient services to the patients. Flexibility considered as a competitive capability is used by healthcare organizations in order to respond to fluctuating patient demands. In this paper, service convenience flexibility is proposed as a new dimension of flexibility in the healthcare context. Several aspects of service convenience flexibility in healthcare context are explored and critically examined. An exploratory study is carried out in a public healthcare system to investigate the capability of service convenience from a flexibility perspective. Different strategies for services convenience flexibility are suggested. Furthermore, the impact of service convenience flexibility on patient satisfaction is also identified.