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To promote access to their services, health-care companies provide various communication channels to their customers (beneficiaries) to enable the receipt of requests, such as authorization for examinations, procedures and hospitalizations. Under the approach of innovation studies, the management of customer relationship channels for health-care companies is characterized as a knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS). The purpose of this study is presenting innovation as a strategy to increase customer service productivity, as well as the monitoring of the quality of the service, the generation of health information for beneficiaries and compliance with the regulation set by the Brazilian National Health Agency (ANS).

The study is characterized as an applied research, as it proposes solutions to problems faced by supplemental health-care companies using the strategy of action research, i.e. an independent, social research with an empirical basis.

The result of this study shows that a computerized health-care system can increase productivity by 21.96%, and it presents an innovative solution for health-care companies to guarantee the process of meeting the demands and requests of their beneficiaries, ensuring the compliance with ANS regulations.

These results can be replicated to other healthcare companies and contribute to those seeking innovation, increased productivity and quality improvements in their services.

This work was also motivated by the lack of lstudies in the areas of health-care companies in Brazil.

A range of strategies to improve pharmaceutical care has been implemented by population health management (PHM) initiatives. However, which strategies generate the desired outcomes is largely unknown. The purpose of this paper is to identify guiding principles underlying collaborative strategies to improve pharmaceutical care and the contextual factors and mechanisms through which these principles operate.

The evaluation was informed by a realist methodology examining the links between PHM strategies, their outcomes and the contexts and mechanisms by which these strategies operate. Guiding principles were identified by grouping context-specific strategies with specific outcomes.

In total, ten guiding principles were identified: create agreement and commitment based on a long-term vision; foster cooperation and representation at the board level; use layered governance structures; create awareness at all levels; enable interpersonal links at all levels; create learning environments; organize shared responsibility; adjust financial strategies to market contexts; organize mutual gains; and align regional agreements with national policies and regulations. Contextual factors such as shared savings influenced the effectiveness of the guiding principles. Mechanisms by which these guiding principles operate were, for instance, fostering trust and creating a shared sense of the problem.

The guiding principles highlight how collaboration can be stimulated to improve pharmaceutical care while taking into account local constraints and possibilities. The interdependency of these principles necessitates effectuating them together in order to realize the best possible improvements and outcomes.

This is the first study using a realist approach to understand the guiding principles underlying collaboration to improve pharmaceutical care.

To investigate the effects of payor–provider integration on the operational performance of health service provision. The research explores whether integration governs agency problems and tilts the incentives of diverse actors toward more systematic outcomes.

A two stage multimethod case study of occupational health services. A qualitative stage aimed to understand the reasons, mechanisms, and outcomes of payor–provider integration. A quantitative stage evaluated the performance of the integrated hospital against fee-for-service partner hospitals with a sample of 2,726 patients.

Payor–provider integration mitigates agency problems on multiple levels of the service system by complementing formal governance mechanisms with informal mechanisms. Compared to partner hospitals, the integrated hospital yielded 9% lower the total costs of occupational injuries achieved primarily by emphasizing conservative care and faster recovery.

Focuses on occupational health services in Finland. Provides initial evidence of the effects of payor–provider integration on the operational performance.

Vertical integration may provide systematic outcomes but requires mindful implementation of multiple mechanisms. Rigorous change management initiative is advised.

For patients, the research shows payor–provider integration of health services can be implemented in a manner that it reduces care costs while not compromising care quality and customer satisfaction.

This study provides a rare longitudinal analysis of payor–provider integration in health-care operations management. The study adds to the knowledge of operational performance improvement of health services.

This study aims to offer novel insights on how industrial marketing might contribute to bringing innovations to market in the peculiar case of health care. This study aims at shedding first light on how the alignment between dissemination and exploitation activities might contribute to bringing to market innovations developed by public–private partnerships funded by the European Commission (EC).

The theoretical development comes from an inductive research design based on the 42-month pan-European H2020 research project NESTORE aimed at developing an integrated portfolio of innovations for the healthy aging of European citizens.

This study advances the theory and practice of industrial marketing in health care by conceptualizing an actionable method to align dissemination and exploitation activities within EC-funded projects, facilitating that innovations will go to market. The method is composed of five phases. First, an external analysis to define market opportunities and users’/stakeholders’ needs. Second, an internal analysis to identify the most promising exploitable outputs. Third, scenarios crystallization to define the most suitable scenarios (business models) to bring the selected exploitable outputs to market. Fourth, exploitation and dissemination alignment through the identification and involvement of the most relevant stakeholders. Fifth, scenario refinement and business plan.

This study is relevant because many EC-funded projects still fail to move innovations from labs to market, thus limiting the benefits for the European citizens and the competitiveness of Europe with respect to the USA and China. Although this relevance, past studies overlooked the peculiar context of EC-funded innovation projects, privileging pharmaceutical and biomedical companies. This study advance theory and practice of industrial marketing in health care.

To better understand the reality of living with the diseases and conditions that its drugs and therapies are developed to treat, the Novartis leadership determined a need for more meaningful insights into patients’ lives. They sought to develop a systematic, creative methodology – informed by the psychology of insightful rather than analytical thinking – to properly integrate and deploy the research commissioned into its day-to-day business decision-making. For it is well established that better understanding of the patient reality drives both compliance and adherence “beyond the pill”. The purpose of this paper is to bring the novel methodology of creativity to a wider audience and ensure that many others – notably in patient advocacy organizations – can benefit from this approach.

A core team of Insight and Analytics and Patient Engagement leads from various therapeutic area teams worked in partnership with a psychologist and practitioner in the field of insightful thinking, to develop an effective methodology that could reliably surface and articulate genuine patient insights. This methodology – the i4i Insights Discovery™ process – was developed, piloted, refined and codified in 2020 and implemented across the company in 2021–2022. It uses a combination of convergent and divergent thinking techniques – human rather than artificial intelligence, combining diverse research outputs – to understand patients’ lives better. With enhanced understanding, the insights then shape educational and behavioral strategies to drive adherence and compliance.

At a time of tightening budgets and demands to deliver enhanced impact from research budgets, i4i Insights Discovery™ has enabled Novartis teams to turn existing research outputs into profound and useful understandings of what it means to live with specific diseases and develop evidence-based patient engagement strategies; insight-driven decision-making around the lifecycle of any compound. i4i Insights Discovery™ has been applied across Novartis’s diverse areas of expertise, from heart disease to cancer, from organ transplantation to dermatology, from food allergy to ophthalmology.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process enables Novartis teams to gain deeper understanding of patients’ lives without the need to commission additional research; to do more with less. These insights enable cross-functional Novartis teams to develop better-informed strategies that better address the needs of patients and their care partners, of health-care professionals and health-care systems. The team creating the process is looking to make the i4i Insights Discovery™ approach a gold standard of insight discovery, both for pharma and health care and in other categories, too.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process is a practical, novel application of well-established principles in the psychology of insightful thinking to address a clear business imperative. By repurposing and reinterpreting existing research outputs using creative verbal and visual exercises, it delivers a more human and empathetic understanding of the patient reality. It moves teams from “So what?” – this is what the data mean – to “Now what?” – this is what we should do as a result.

The aim of this paper is to identify some of the challenges that need to be addressed to accelerate the deployment and adoption of smart health technologies for ubiquitous healthcare access. The paper also explores how internet of things (IoT) and big data technologies can be combined with smart health to provide better healthcare solutions.

The authors reviewed the literature to identify the challenges which have slowed down the deployment and adoption of smart health.

The authors discussed how IoT and big data technologies can be integrated with smart health to address some of the challenges to improve health-care availability, access and costs.

The results of this paper will help health-care designers, professionals and researchers design better health-care information systems.

Due to the different institutional pressure such as those from market, regulations and competitors, companies have implemented green supply chain management (GSCM). Unfortunately, tens of GSCM practices exist. Whether all companies should implement GSCM and how to achieve both environmental and economic performance are still not clear for many companies. The purpose of this paper is to develop models that can be helpful for companies to identify right GSCM practices and implement GSCM effectively and efficiently.

Based on about 18 years of study on GSCM with four surveys in China in 2001, 2005, 2012 and 2016, as well as numerous site visits and interviews mainly in China but also in Japan, Germany and Canada, this paper explores institutional drivers as well as opportunities and challenges using theoretical analysis and case studies. GSCM is defined considering a product life cycle. A key three-step GSCM approach is theoretically developed considering opportunities and challenges through life cycle analysis (LCA) of a product and position of a company.

All companies should implement GSCM practices to avoid risks. To effectively implement GSCM practices, a company should understand the life cycle of its product and its position in the supply chain. A key three-step LCA-based approach can help companies to identify the critical GSCM practices.

A key three-step LCA-based approach for GSCM implementation is originally developed based on theoretical analysis and eight years of study.

The estimation of the burden of a disease is one of the tasks with the longest tradition in health economics, which allows us to know the volume of resources that a country allocates to a specific health problem, and to compare countries and diseases. Although the fundamental objective of health systems is not to reduce the cost of the disease, but to improve the health of the population, the studies of burden of disease establish the economic seriousness of the problem, orienting the priorities of action.

Government-funded medical expenditure in Uruguay for the last ten years has tripled in US dollars. The increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has contributed to this growth. According to the World Health Organization, Uruguay has the highest growing trend in the prevalence of both overweight and obesity in South America. We have previously estimated that economic burden linked to obesity will be more than US$500 million by 2020, a figure close to 1% of the country’s GDP.

In this study, we tried to generate a measure of value to ascertain the cost of inaction in the fight against obesity and its consequences linked to several non-communicable diseases. The cost of inaction is not defined as the cost of not doing, but as the cost of not implementing the right policies (in this case health prevention policies) at the right time.

The Indian pharmaceutical industry has contributed significantly to global healthcare by securing superior-quality, inexpensive and reachable medicines worldwide. However, supply chain management (SCM) has been challenging due to constantly shifting requirements for short lifecycles of products, the convergence of industry and changeable realities on the ground. This study aims to identify, assess and prioritize the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of the pharmaceutical SCM environment in India.

The paper employs a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat (SWOT) analysis and recognizes strategies to utilize the advantages of the strengths and opportunities, rectify weaknesses and resolve threats.

A variety of strategies that could have a positive effect on the Indian pharmaceutical business are presented. Findings and suggested strategies can significantly advance knowledge, enhance understanding and contribute to the growth of a successful SCM for the Indian pharmaceutical sector.

This paper would act as a roadmap to greater comprehension of the market leaders and market leaders' operating climate. The findings from this study will offer academic scholars and business practitioners deeper insights into the environment of SCM.

The aim of this study is to explore and discuss key challenges associated with having stakeholders take part in co-designing a health care intervention to increase mobility in older medical patients admitted to two medical departments at two hospitals in Denmark.

The study used a qualitative design to investigate the challenges of co-designing an intervention in five workshops involving health professionals, patients and relatives. “Challenges” are understood as “situations of being faced with something that needs great mental or physical effort in order to be done successfully and therefore tests a person's ability” (Cambridge Dictionary). Thematic content analysis was conducted with a background in the analytical question: “What key challenges arise in the material in relation to the co-design process?”.

Two key challenges were identified: engagement and facilitation. These consisted of five sub-themes: recruiting patients and relatives, involving physicians, adjusting to a new researcher role, utilizing contextual knowledge and handling ethical dilemmas.

The population of patients and relatives participating in the workshops was small, which likely affected the co-design process.

Researchers who want to use co-design must be prepared for the extra time required and the need for skills concerning engagement, communication, facilitation, negotiation and resolution of conflict. Time is also required for ethical discussions and considerations concerning different types of knowledge creation.

Engaging stakeholders in co-design processes is increasingly encouraged. This study documents the key challenges in such processes and reports practical implications.