Exploring the Antecedents for Value Cocreation during Healthcare Service Provision

ABSTRACT: One of the challenges of providing healthcare services is to create and properly deliver value for consumers (i.e., patients). Patients (vs. physicians) have long obtained a passive role when receiving healthcare services (vs. providing services). However, the emerging Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic suggests that value is always co-created between the service provider and the service recipient. In line with this thinking, we argue that the value of healthcare services can be maximized when the physician and patient co-create that value together. While prior research on healthcare provider-patient relationships has examined related concepts to co-creation, research on co-creation in the healthcare context remains limited. Consequently, this research reviews concepts related to co-creation and determines whether they are in line with the tenets of the co-creation concept as proposed by the S-D Logic. Moreover, this research derives a conceptual model of the determinants of value co-creation in the context of healthcare provider-patient relationships. Finally, this research derives value functions that can be used to model co-creation in the healthcare service provision context.INTRODUCTIONThe emerging Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic in marketing argues that value is always co-created between the service provider and the service recipient (Vargo and Lusch 2004; Vargo, Maglio, and Akaka 2008). It suggests that consumers are endogenous to the value creation process, rather than targets of producer-created value, because they engage their unique knowledge and skills in social, dynamic, and interactive network relationships with firms and other stakeholders (Merz, He, and Vargo 2009). Thus, the S-D Logic embraces a process-oriented view to co-creation. Furthermore, the S-D Logic suggests that value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary (Vargo, Morgan, Akaka, and He 2009). As a result, the S-D Logic suggests that service providers need to aim at co-creating dynamic, social, and interactive service ecosystems together with their customers such that customers have the highest value-in-use and value-in-context perceptions (Merz et al. 2009).More recently, healthcare marketers have discussed the importance of applying the logic of co-creation to the healthcare context (Nambisan and Nambisan 2009). They argue that a more customer-centered approach to health services is needed due to an increasing focus on preventative health and patient self-care (McColl-Kennedy, Vargo, Dagger, Sweeney, and van Kasteren 2012; Roter, Hall, and Katz 1988). In addition, they argue that a more customercentered approach has many benefits for both the physician and the patient thereby further substantiating the importance of examining co-creation in the healthcare context in general and the healthcare provider-patient relationship context in particular (see also Jayawardhena and Foley 2000).Given this, it is not surprising that healthcare marketers have examined several concepts related to co-creation in the healthcare provider-patient relationship context, such as shared decision-making (e.g., Alden, Merz, and Akashi 2012), patient empowerment (e.g., Ouschan, Sweeney, and Johnson 2000), patient centeredness (e.g., Kinnersley, Stott, Peters, and Harvey 1999), patient involvement (e.g., Elwyn, Edwards, Kinnersely, and Grol 2000), patient participation (e.g., Guadoagnoli and Ward 1998), and patient autonomy (Hayashi, Hasui, Kitamura et al. 2000). This research has resulted in valuable insights. Most importantly, it has provided implicit evidence of the importance of the co-creation concept in the context of healthcare provider-patient relationships. However, it is unclear how these concepts are related to the cocreation concept. Furthermore, it is unclear what the determinants of the cocreation construct in the context of healthcare provider-patient relationships are. Finally, it is unclear how to model co-creation in the healthcare context. …