Reflections on New Service Development in Healthcare Industry

Abstract

The research of new service development in the healthcare industry is just emerging. This is linked to the change of focus of healthcare services from being internally oriented to being focused on patients, but also to the still undeveloped nature of new service development as a field. This paper provides a review of the most important topics on introducing service development in healthcare industry, covering the involvement of customers in service development and the use of information technology. Our results suggest that the solution to solving the co-production and the co-creation puzzles is digital transformation. There are proofs that information technology is part of the new services developed within the healthcare industry, as there are proofs that the use of information technology leads to services which increase patients’ participation in service production.

Keywords

• new product development
• coproduction
• healthcare industry
• digital transformation
• service design
• services