Health is Co-Created

The creation of health has always been about partnerships. Health isn’t something that can be achieved in isolation. Unfortunately, patients today have come to depend upon the healthcare system to keep them healthy. And while providers are doing an amazing job when it comes to medical intervention, the reality is that American patients are in an unhealthy state. The way to fix this is to pursue co-created health. Read about it here.

Healthcare will come to depend upon a business model made prominent in the previous decade: co-creation. Co-creation is simply value created together by the customer and the firm. In healthcare that value is health and it’s created by the patient and their providers.

Bruce Nussbaum has written that today’s organizations need to be in the “enabling business” to be successful. He continues, “All the talk about platforms and convergence and content is about people building their very own products and services to fit their lives.” Healthcare needs to become an enabler of health, to allow and encourage patients to build their very own health-creating services in partnership with healthcare providers. 

The transition to co-creation is a momentous challenge. Today’s healthcare service offerings are too often limited to the reactive approach of treating illness. Healthcare will always be necessary to treat illness; but there is an increasing societal need to also enable health creation. The reality is that the vast majority of healthy decision making relies on the individual responsibility of patients; for a plethora of reasons patients are struggling with that responsibility. Health as a partnership, co-created, marks the realization that traditional healthcare can do more to help patients lead a healthy lifestyle.