Value Co-Creation Activities Role in Patient Well-Being in Online Healthcare Communities

Abstract

Healthcare service delivery has been rapidly changing over the last decades. The paradigm of passive patients and active healthcare professionals is increasingly being replaced by the active engagement of patients as primary beneficiaries of healthcare services. Moreover, public, private, and non-profit sectors of health care are converging via the emergence of the fourth sector, and some service providers are providing online forums to help fulfilling patients’ unmet needs. These platforms are built to help the social inclusion of patients. On one hand, Online Healthcare Communities (OHC) are getting more popular as an engagement platform that helps patients to integrate resources with their peers and fulfill the needs that remain unmet during the interaction with their healthcare practitioners. On the other hand, scholars are getting more interested in investigating the relations between value co-creation activities and well-being (Transformative Service Research). OHCs are a value-dense environment to co-create value; moreover, they can be used to observe value co-creation activities without the researcher’s interference. In this chapter, to achieve a better understanding of the subject, a PRISMA protocol was followed by conducting a systematic literature review, and 38 articles were identified. The thematic analysis revealed: benefits, drawbacks, antecedents, barriers, typologies, and main theoretical backgrounds. Moreover, two main concepts were extracted: Social Support and Transformative Service Research.