Health Care: A Fertile Field for Service Research

Health care is an enormously expensive, highly complex, universally used service that significantly affects economies and the quality of daily living. Service management, operations, and marketing scholars have much to offer to a critically important, intellectually challenging, but deeply troubled health care service sector. In this article, the authors use the opportunity they had to study at one of the world's most admired medical institutions— Mayo Clinic—as the basis for discussing the similarities and dissimilarities between health care and other services. The article takes the reader “inside” health care. The authors challenge service scholars to consider health care for their research activities and propose areas for future research.