Designing Mobile Health and Well-being Applications: A Value-oriented Approach

Mobile health and well-being applications (MHWBAs) provide a means of enhancing the delivery of health care. Ensuring that value is delivered to health care customers (patients) can be a challenge as health initiatives are often supplier-centered and may not take into account patient expectations. In addition, stakeholders including clinicians, customers and MHWBA designers may be divided in their views about what features, and functionalities are required, and how much control patients should have. A close working collaboration between stakeholders may bring significant benefits. Therefore, service systems such as an MHWBA should provide value co-creation opportunities, and support patient engagement by creating a positive environment in which actors can network and communicate with empathy. This study proposes and validates a value-oriented framework for mobile services that can be used to derive MHWBA design guidelines. The framework is based on a three-dimensional typology of service value co-creation activities which considers the cocreation activity type, the dominant participating actor, and the dominant benefitting actor. The framework can be used to analyze the value co-creation potential of existing or proposed mobile apps in a range of service contexts. In this study, the framework was applied to the case of the Green Prescription (GRx) service and was used to identify a range of concrete value co-creating activities. In further work. these activities will underpin the design requirements for a GRx MHWBA, with relevant features supporting a value co-creation process that brings value to both GRx patients and GRx providers.