Ethics of Collaborative Health Systems Design
Co-creation refers to interactive practices that help critical stakeholders—patients, clinicians, and administrators, for example—work together to discern mutual values, develop strategies to address shared challenges, promote common goals, and motivate desired outcomes. Popularized in the 1990s as a means of improving consumer satisfaction, co-creation efforts began by inviting consumer participation in designing, marketing, and delivering products and services. In the health care sector, co-creation seeks to maximize health systems performance, support efficiency in cross-disciplinary collaboration among clinicians, and personalize patients’ health care experiences. This issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics considers ethical dimensions of what it means to implement and operationalize this kind of strategic planning in health care, both at the micro level of patient-clinician relationships, for example, and at the macro level among providers, payers, and policymakers.