The International Coproduction Health Network (ICoHN) is a network of communities of practice composed of multiple communities of practice (CoPs) which have been engaged in improving health and healthcare through a focus on coproduction. The coproduction perspective challenges traditional thinking about how healthcare is conceptualized, viewing it as a service rather than something that is produced or delivered by the healthcare system. In this way, patients and professionals are not contained within the healthcare system, suggesting the myriad ways in which people may interact with individuals and organisations outside of the healthcare system to affect both health and healthcare service outcomes. This new conceptualization of how healthcare services are coproduced requires a new ways of thinking about how quality and value are generated and how these aspects can be assessed and measured to inform improvement and strategic decision making in health systems.
In 2020, ICoHN established a CoP focussed on coproduction value creation called the Value Creating Business Model Community of Practice. This group was composed of healthcare operations and finance leaders, clinicians, and patients from eleven health systems representing four countries and engaged on a one-year initiative to develop a self-assessment approach for health systems to assess coproduction value in health services using an adaptation of Fjeldstad’s value architectures. The self-assessment approach is now being applied and studied in four health systems in two counties in the CO-VALUE study, which aims to further develop the self-assessment approach to provide qualitative and quantitative assessment options. The study is now in its second year (Phase 2), which launched in January, 2021 and is developing the qualitative assessment approach.
Brant Oliver, PhD, MS, MPH, APRN-BC, CHIRP director and Associate Professor at Dartmouth, has been developing this work in collaboration with Dr. Paul Batalden at Dartmouth, and serves as principal investigator on the CO-VALUE study.
“It is a tremendous honor and opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Batalden in this forward- thinking work that is right on the cutting edge,” says Dr. Oliver. “It comes as no surprise to me that a large part of this work comes from his gift of challenging us to look at health and healthcare from another point of view. The CO-VALUE work is an attempt to study the new idea of value creation in coproduction with a rigorous research approach. It is a great pleasure to work with the CO-VALUE investigators on this innovative initiative which might just be peering into a possible future state of healthcare services.”
You can read more about coproduction in Dr. Batalden’s article on Getting More Health.
