The Promises and Challenges toward Mass Customization of Healthcare Services

The healthcare industry is confronted with the challenge to offer an increasing variety of healthcare services while in the meantime controlling rapidly increasing healthcare costs. Mass customization has been proven to be an effective strategy to fulfill customers’ individual specific needs with high efficiency and low cost in the manufacturing industry. This paper investigates the theoretical feasibility and practical applicability of adopting mass customization as a conceptual framework for designing a healthcare service delivery system. The nature of healthcare delivery systems and their evolution are discussed relative to those of manufacturing systems. Recent research in personalized medicine, consumer-driven healthcare, consumer healthcare informatics, and integrated healthcare delivery is reviewed as enabling technologies towards mass customization of healthcare services. By synthesizing these scattered efforts in different streams of literature, this paper concludes that mass customization can contribute to the redesign of healthcare service systems, and delineates a roadmap for future research.