title: The impact of health care professionals' service orientation on patients' innovative behavior.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The increasing availability of medical information and the rising relevance of patient communities drive the active role of health consumers in health care processes. Patients become experts on their disease and provide valuable stimuli for novel care solutions. Medical encounters evolve toward a more collaborative health care service process, where patients are accepted as equal partners. However, the patient's active role depends on the interaction with the involved health care professionals.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The aim of this article is to examine whether the service orientation of health care professionals and their proactive and adaptive work behavior and the extent of shared goals within the necessary interdisciplinary health professional team influence patients' innovative behavior.
  
  
  METHODS
  We address six rare diseases and use interview and survey data to test theoretically derived hypotheses. The sample consists of 86 patients and their 160 health care professionals. Sixty patients provided additional information via interviews. Patients' innovative behavior is reflected by the number of generated ideas as well as the variety of ideas.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The service orientation of work teams plays an important role in the innovation process of patients. As hypothesized, the extent of shared goals within the health care teams has a direct effect on patients' idea generation. Work adaptivity and proactivity and shared goals both reinforce the positive effect of service orientation. Furthermore, significant associations between the three independent variables and the second outcome variable of patient's idea variety are confirmed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The study underlines (1) the important role of patients within health care service innovation processes, (2) the necessity of a service-oriented working climate to foster the development of innovative care solutions for rare diseases, and (3) the need for an efficient cooperation and open mindset of health care professionals to motivate and support patient innovation.
authors.affiliation: Henrike Hannemann-Weber, PhD, is Senior Researcher, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. Carsten Schultz, PhD, is Professor for Technology Management, Institute for Innovation Research, University of Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. E-mail: schultz@bwl.uni-kiel.de.
authors.forename: Hannemann-Weber
authors.initials: HW
authors.lastname: Henrike
authors.forename: Carsten
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schultz
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008297:Male; D010347:Patient Care Planning; D010348:Patient Care Team; D010361:Patients / Q000523:psychology*; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology*; D035583:Rare Diseases / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy