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disease or health condition and form disease-focused support groups has led another
type of active participation - namely, collective consumer knowledge creation.
For example, consider the case of Gleevec, an experimental drug that showed
some evidence to shrink tumors in patients affected by chronic myelogenous
leukemia, a potentially deadly disease. Patients with this disease formed a group
called “Life Raft,” a listserv, where they shared their knowledge about the drug
itself, the benefits, and the side effects as well as their experiences at the clinical
trial. This in turn led hundreds of similar patients to sign up for the clinical tri-
als, eventually forcing the FDA to fast track the drug approval process. In October
2001, this group that did not have any formal medical education published a review
of Gleevec's side effects in a medical journal (Solowitch, 2001).
The increasing number of such examples in consumer-driven collective knowl-
edge creation (Solowitch, 2001) attests to the fact that consumer participation
in online health communities has gone beyond merely extending support to one
another. The collective pooling of resources and information by consumer groups
can lead to different types of innovation - for example, generating ideas for inno-
vative healthcare services or improving the quality of existing services; advancing
medical research on particular diseases; or developing extensive experiential knowl-
edge on specific treatments. The potential for consumer to take active part in such
service innovation holds important implications for healthcare organizations and the
healthcare industry in general, and forms the primary focus of this chapter.
Most healthcare organizations are under considerable pressure to enhance the
value they offer to their consumers (or patients). The notion of value-driven
healthcare organization (Addleman, 1995) and value-based competition is gain-
ing increasing importance (Porter & Teisberg, 2006) as consumers are increasingly
voicing their discontentment with existing quality of healthcare services. Porter and
Teisberg (2006) in their topic on “Redefining Healthcare” call for competition based
on value and results.
Partnership with customers to enhance their ability to innovate and co-create
disease-focused knowledge implies another significant opportunity to enhance
the agenda of such value-driven health organizations. Such a partnership would
acknowledge the increasing ability of customers to engage in collective knowledge
co-creation as well as the availability of sophisticated information-technology-based
infrastructure to support that process. However, pursuing such a partnership with
consumers would require a deeper understanding of the knowledge creation process
as well as the contextual factors that would shape the success of such efforts.
Thus, this chapter aims to contribute toward developing such a theoretical under-
standing of IT-enabled consumer knowledge co-creation and co-innovation in health
care. We first introduce the notion of value-driven healthcare organization and dis-
cuss the relevance of consumer participation in service innovation in this context.
Following that, we describe the notion of service innovation and discuss the relation-
ship between service innovation and healthcare quality. We argue that an important
task for value-driven healthcare organizations is to facilitate consumer driven ser-
vice innovation in health care through appropriate use of online health information
technologies (HIT).
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