SERVICE DOMINANT LOGIC, NETWORK & SYSTEMS THEORY AND SERVICE SCIENCE: INTEGRATING THREE PERSPECTIVES FOR A NEW SERVICE AGENDA.

Purpose: Healthcare needs to be organized more functionally compared to the users’ needs the availability of resources offered by actors involved in the provision of related services. This is a historically rooted and long-lasting issue to be addressed, affecting almost all national realities at territorial, political, technological and economic level. Hence sustainable solutions ought to be pursued, in search of models and methods capable of being replicable, scalable and versatile in different contexts. Today there are several initiatives to improve the conditions of hospitalization of patients, technical advancement in equipments and the progress of the structures responsible. Many actors are involved in various capacities in this field, everyone has priorities, strategies and procedure often different; their interaction reflects differences in each type of information, in terms of language, of purposes, of operations. It seems therefore still missing a concrete method of understanding that is also truly unifying. This work aims to highlight the role of the relationships within several organizations operating within a modern National Healthcare System (NHS) and involved in the value co-creation process linked to the healthcare service provision. Some themes just like service, service-system, eco-system, smart-system are deepened, in order to foster new original reflections about the NHS functions, design and governance. Design and Methodology: Starting from the deepening of healthcare networks logic, intended as sets of entities working together, an attempt to interpret the different relations between under a systems point of view was done. Findings: It was interesting to deepen the match between the cooperation logic of healthcare networks and the systems view of the nowadays organizations’ behavior within the modern NHS. So many connections were found and a number of mutual effects come out from different entities relationships. Originality: The interpretation of the NHS as a complex service eco-system, in which many actors (consciously or not) operate for the same value proposition, it is an interesting point of view, useful for the correct understanding of any phenomenon investigated. Research and practical implications: The possibility to relate the system and the service logic for new strategies within the NHS help us to better plan the operations of the organizations involved; new model can be developed for the governance of those organizations. This sounds good for managerial implications also.