Overview

This invitation only event aims to bring together senior practitioners and policy leaders embedded in the digital health ecosystem to discuss digital innovation and data in healthcare, management, policy and clinical service delivery.

Organisers

• Dr Panos Constantinides, Associate Professor of Information Systems, WBS

• Professor Eivor Oborn - Director of Health Specialism, Warwick MBA Programme

• Professor Michael Barrett - Academic Director- Cambridge Digital Innovation

Speakers include

Confirmed speakers include Professor Geoffrey Parker (Dartmouth University and MIT) and co-author of the highly cited book by both academics and practitioners alike Platform Revolution (Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary, 2016); Samer Faraj, McGill University and a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium’s Business-IT Strategies practice. More will be confirmed over the coming weeks.

Would your company be interested in sponsoring our Digital Health Forum Series?

If so please contact jennifer.griffiths@wbs.ac.uk for further information.

Digital Health Forum: Scaling Digital Health Innovation through Platforms

Encouraging health innovation is vital at a time of spiralling costs. There is therefore an ever-growing demand for healthcare to improve lives through innovation in technologies, products and business models. Health IT provides many opportunities for digitizing care and indeed many success stories abound as to how particular delivery units or health providers can innovate their service through technology. The wide availability of digital technology is playing a role in spawning an increasing pace of innovation taking place on top of digital platforms, defined as – “a set of digital services and content that enables value-creating interactions between external actors such as producers and consumers” (Constantinides, Henfridsson & Parker 2018). Across other industries, the sheer power of platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, Apple iOS and Google Play has transformed the scale and speed of innovation at a pace unimaginable just a few years ago.

The value of a digital health platform is realised through the development of new services that leverage its capabilities over time. Moreover, services need to be designed that both leverage the data but also fit with the workflow of patients who can interact with health providers, advisors and peers to share knowledge and interests in similar conditions (Barrett et al 2016; Valdez et al 2017). Such interactions are enabled by digital technologies including wearables, self-tracking devices and smartphone applications, all of which can provide renewed opportunities to scale up digital health services. In addition to the opportunities digital platforms may enable, there are also a range of challenges which may thwart the effective scaling of early successful pilots at the Hospital Trust level in an industry which remains conservative, heavily regulated, with established traditional business models. How a health innovation can thrive within a context needs to explicitly recognise how procurement and commissioning can support innovation, and that recognises the wider context of organisational, cultural and behavioural issues in the health system.