PartnerCare

PartnerCare is a project I've been involved with over the past couple of years off and on, and I think it is one of the coolest customer co-creation of value examples out in the market, if not the most radical. Basically, PartnerCare is a service provided by STD clinics that is legal in 31 states (as of 12/2011) where a health care provider can treat a patient for a bacterial STD, and then give the patient medicine that the patient can take to their partner(s).

Obviously, this service has a number of customer performance elements to it, as it essentially puts patients in the role of being a dispensing pharmacist (and that's a whole new twist on self-service). My colleagues and I shot an interesting video documentary at Denver Public Health's STD clinic. You can check it out at http://partnercare.org/clinic-case-studies to see how it all works. We even shot videos illustrating "what it might be like" for patients to provide these kinds of medicines to their partners.