When Are Calories Like Furniture? Modeling Service Systems to Improve Health

The furniture retailer IKEA provides an example of how understanding the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in a value constellation can lead to change that improves value creation in a complex service system. In this paper, we apply the same kind of thinking about value creation that worked for IKEA to the complex service systems of population health, including chronic diseases such as obesity. We show how service system thinking - analyzing value constellations to find opportunities for reconfiguring roles and relationships that unlock value - can be applied to real health systems by focusing on accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes, models of care delivery that aim to reconfigure provider, patient, and payer relationships to offer better care. We argue that modeling and simulating the value constellations of complex service systems, such as the health system, can help us discover which interventions and reconfigurations will be effective and which will not.