What is Experience Co-Creation in Health Care?

Co-creation is popular in health care. Popular, without being a hype. Lots of people use the term co-creation. They express the wish or, better, need to work together with other parties on issues of health care. No wonder, a multitude of medical disciplines, health institutes and industries are concerned. Staff professions and service providers are in the loop as well. Payer as well as authority organizations, devices, pharma, IT and the wearable mobile industry too, are all immanent in lots of care processes. Costs and effectiveness of health care, as well as satisfaction about a health care process, depend on the quality of collaboration of all of these stakeholders. Working together is conditional to health care.

Co-Creation however, is not like the traditional way of “working together”. Don’t be mistaken! All of us, as patient, or workers in health care, are familiar with projects that start enthusiastically, but often die in silence while participants become aware that it is not going to work anymore: they avoid being associated with failure. Or worse, cooperate halfheartedly to one another, for what ever reason.

Also, changes in health care might be perceived as innovative, but may in fact be either too bold to succeed, or too sissy to notice: its value may fall short of being a true innovation. Real innovation in health care positively impacts all stakeholders, as quality, effectiveness, costs, outcomes and/or satisfaction of health care will benefit any stakeholders’ interests, which, of course starts and ends with the patients’ ones.

Experience co-creation is an effective method to innovate value to patients in a personalized way, in collaboration with all relevant stakeholders.

It is intended to benefit patients in coping with their health conditions and to arrive at a satisfying state of quality of life, given their specific personal health conditions.

The concept of the method of co-creation is based on acknowledging the difficulties in health care to work together. It has a built-in provision to sort immanent conflicts of interests and opinions up front. It does so by having the participants in the process learn each others perspective in the course of the development of innovation. And, as for experience co-creation, will explicitly build means to personalize process and products to ones liking and benefits. It is indeed aimed at building the experience of a person in concordance.

Experience co-creation in care enables the effectiveness of the total process: efficacy of medical interventions, therapy, rehabilitation and lifestyle. It facilitates the selection and provision of the right intervention at the most economical level of cost, while, at the same time leveraging the highest chances of the best possible outcomes of health care. Looking at just this from a patient perspective, one can readily imagine that not only personal physical aspects matter to this, but also attitude, apprehension and consent to instructions, support, information and education given for the patient. Surely a complicated issue, which all too often fails without anyone involved wishing so, nor deliberately acting to such. To the contrary. Still, more than once, impact and result of health care processes fall short of what participants aspire.

As Co-creation and Experience Co-creation depart from the integration of all stakeholders’ interests and appreciation of their perspectives and perceptions, it will directly associate with ideas of integrated care and participatory care. No doubt. The use of technology, mobile and on-line, goes along without saying too. With that, it directly relates with e-health. E-Health is defined by the The Journal of Medical Internet Research as health services and information delivered or enhanced through the internet and related technologies. Creating e-health with different parties involved will not succeed without co-creating it. [See here]

Co-creation and experience co-creation in health care, start from the idea that feasible, appreciated, effective and satisfying health care processes can only be realized:

• through multidisciplinary collaboration,
• with a participatory starting point to patients’ commitment and involvement in a self management way,
• in the context of an ecosystem of support and information on-line,
• based upon (mobile) instruments/devices registering and storing data about the patient,
• directly relating (selected) protagonists in health care to the patient and to each other,
• such that arrangements of collaboration, interaction and medical social and psychological interventions are enabled to be executed in consent, in an efficient and timely way.
• Also, with the conviction that innovation of health care can only be created in a sustainable way, to implicate that these ways of arranging health care processes are monitored, evaluated and continuously adapted to new insights from interdisciplinary research.

How then, would you ask, will all this be brought to life? The method to co-create, obviously has different phases. It has several sequential steps that do not only build the group of participants to a design team, but also address the different aspects of relevant perspectives too. It teaches the participants the significance of understanding the “other” view. This will often happen with surprising results, with expressions, like: “Well, I never knew that..”.
The resolve of doubts about the other and to reach an understanding of different perceptions, will unleash lots of creativity and energy – a dynamic that fuels motivation and resolution.

Core to this step wise procedure is the lay-out, inspection, analysis and redesign of the Patient Journey through the health care processes. Several techniques can be used to effectively structure the discussions and creative designing of the stakeholder team.
Once the patient process is clearly construed, one can detect crucial interactions and touch points between players in the process for which specific services can be created, support be given and  information can be delivered, etc.
These moments of interaction can then be evaluated for their suitability to on-line support. Also, one can then see how a multi channel design can help efficacy.
Several pilots during construction and development will evaluate processes drawn and check on opportunities to increase satisfaction. Final pilots are obvious to inspect total costs and outcomes.
You’ll understand, the efficacy of the process wants some social engineering.
We have coached several processes in the development of health care and of the business in health care provision, specifically regarding the design and implementation of e-health.
You might want to have me discuss your initiatives to demonstrate the case of co-creation with it.

See what co-creation is about here:  Co-Creation and experience co-creation in care

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