Innovative Paradigms for Enhancing Healthcare Service Performance

The healthcare sector, defined in general as the industry that “... provides goods and services to treat patients with curative, preventive, rehabilitative or palliative care” (Taneja et al., 2017), has been under huge pressure in recent years: population ageing, financial constraints, wellbeing evolution, and so on (Lega et al., 2018; Grenier et al., 2019). Nevertheless, the Covid-19 pandemic has had an unimaginable impact on the global health system, highlighting even more sharply all the current and prospective difficulties of the healthcare industry (Berawi, 2020; Farooq, Ali, 2020; Muthuraman, Al Haziazi, 2020). In this regard, it should be mentioned that all the activities, services, and performances connected to healthcare have the characteristics of a long-term existence, because they are naturally connected to human health but at the same time they are constantly innovating (Schiavone, Simoni, 2019), because people’s expectations about health are continuously influenced by the evolution of the macro-environment (Schiavone et al., 2020b) and the demographic-social-cultural system in particular (a constant increase in average life expectancy, a common tendency to prolong specific habits, and a vast recourse to innovative products like nutraceuticals, for example). This combination has, over time, required the adoption of increasingly responsible and interdisciplinary perspectives (Lega et al., 2018)