The Healers Boon: How Patients and Providers Find Value

Abstract

Arthritis is a chronic condition requiring repeated close contact with healthcare providers within a patients' care team. Much of the research on arthritis has focused on the treatment efficacy of arthritis medications. While the gains in treatments designed to reduce pain are significant, there remains little research to describe the lived experience of arthritis patients. Additionally, healthcare appears to be operating, in part, with an outdated managerial logic. Marketing theory is poised to offer an alternative approach enabling healthcare to refine its service techniques. By transforming the obsolete philosophy of standardized care and mass application to one of personalized care and stewardship, patients and providers can find a new sense of value co-creation. This is the basis for Service-Dominant Logic, a metatheoretical framework for examining the process of mutual value creation. Acknowledging the patient's inherent value and dismantling the current barriers to healthcare informed by an outdated goods dominant approach may enhance both the patient and the provider's sense of value co-creation. This study utilized a qualitative approach interviewing arthritis patients and rheumatologists to explore the value co-creation process. The application of service-dominant logic to healthcare contains many implications for increasing patient health outcomes and medication adherence to arthritis therapies.