The impact of health care professionals’ service orientation on patients’ innovative behavior.

August 9, 2013 Editor 0

The impact of health care professionals’ service orientation on patients’ innovative behavior.

Health Care Manage Rev. 2013 Jul 26;

Authors: Henrike HW, Schultz C

Abstract

BACKGROUND:: The increasing availability of medical information and the rising relevance of patient communities drive the active role of health consumers in health care processes. Patients become experts on their disease and provide valuable stimuli for novel care solutions. Medical encounters evolve toward a more collaborative health care service process, where patients are accepted as equal partners. However, the patient’s active role depends on the interaction with the involved health care professionals.

PURPOSE:: The aim of this article is to examine whether the service orientation of health care professionals and their proactive and adaptive work behavior and the extent of shared goals within the necessary interdisciplinary health professional team influence patients’ innovative behavior.

METHODOLOGY:: We address six rare diseases and use interview and survey data to test theoretically derived hypotheses. The sample consists of 86 patients and their 160 health care professionals. Sixty patients provided additional information via interviews. Patients’ innovative behavior is reflected by the number of generated ideas as well as the variety of ideas.

FINDINGS:: The service orientation of work teams plays an important role in the innovation process of patients. As hypothesized, the extent of shared goals within the health care teams has a direct effect on patients’ idea generation. Work adaptivity and proactivity and shared goals both reinforce the positive effect of service orientation. Furthermore, significant associations between the three independent variables and the second outcome variable of patient’s idea variety are confirmed.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS:: The study underlines (1) the important role of patients within health care service innovation processes, (2) the necessity of a service-oriented working climate to foster the development of innovative care solutions for rare diseases, and (3) the need for an efficient cooperation and open mindset of health care professionals to motivate and support patient innovation.

PMID: 23896657 [PubMed – as supplied by publisher]

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Categories: PubMed

Tags: behavior health care, health consumers, innovation processes, rare diseases