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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the “Johari Window” as a tool to illustrate how providers and patients differ in their understanding of healthcare quality.

The four quadrants of the Johari Window depict information known by both parties, by providers only, by patients only and by neither party.

By understanding these differing perceptions, clinicians and planners can improve the patient’s experience of service delivery.

There has been no formal evaluation of this tool’s performance. It is presented as a heuristic teaching model to stimulate inquiry and discussion.

The author has used the Johari Window in various cultural contexts, where its clarity and simplicity help introduce a potentially sensitive subject. Because it has face validity as an easy-to-understand tool, it can be used with students and junior care providers as well as non-clinician governors.

When using a service, customers often develop their own solutions by integrating resources to solve problems and co-create value. Drawing on innovation and creativity literature, this paper aims to investigate the influence of place (the service setting and the customer setting) on customer creativity in a health-care context.

In a field study using customer diaries, 200 ideas from orthopedic surgery patients were collected and evaluated by an expert panel using the consensual assessment technique (CAT).

Results suggest that place influences customer creativity. In the customer setting, customers generate novel ideas that may improve their clinical health. In the service setting, customers generate ideas that may improve the user value of the service and enhance the customer experience. Customer creativity is influenced by the role the customer adopts in a specific place. In the customer setting customers were more likely to develop ideas involving active customer roles. Interestingly, while health-care customers provided ideas in both settings, contrary to expectation, ideas scored higher on user value in the service setting than in the customer setting.

This study shows that customer creativity differs in terms of originality, user value and clinical value depending on the place (service setting or customer setting), albeit in one country in a standardized care process.

The present research puts customer creativity in relation to health-care practices building on an active patient role, suggesting that patients can contribute to the further development of health-care services.

As the first field study to test the influence of place on customer creativity, this research makes a novel contribution to the growing body of work in customer creativity, showing that different places are more/less favorable for different dimensions of creativity. It also relates customer creativity to health-care practices and highlights that patients are an untapped source of creativity with first-hand knowledge and insights, importantly demonstrating how customers can contribute to the further development of health-care services.