Health Care Customer Value Cocreation Practice Styles

This article explores in-depth what health care customers actually do when they cocreate value. Combining previously published research with data collected from depth interviews, field observation, and focus groups, the authors identify distinct styles of health care customer value cocreation practice. Importantly, the authors show how customers can contribute to their own value creation through their own (self) activities in managing their health care. Building on past work in service-dominant (S-D) logic, consumer culture theory and social practice theory, the authors identify “roles,” “activities,” and “interactions” that underlie customer cocreation of value in health care. The authors uncover five groupings of customer value cocreation practices yielding a typology of practice styles and link these to quality of life. The practice styles are “team management,” “insular controlling,” “partnering,” “pragmatic adapting,” and “passive compliance.” Two in particular, team management and partnering, should be encouraged by managers as they tend to be associated with higher quality of life. The authors provide a health care Customer Value Cocreation Practice Styles (CVCPS) typology. The usefulness of the typology is demonstrated by showing links to quality of life and its potential application to other health care settings.