Why Business Modeling is Crucial in the Development of eHealth Technologies

The impact and uptake of information and communication technologies that support health care are rather low. Current frameworks for eHealth development suffer from a lack of fitting infrastructures, inability to find funding, complications with scalability, and uncertainties regarding effectiveness and sustainability. These issues can be addressed by defining a better implementation strategy early in the development of eHealth technologies. A business model, and thus business modeling, help to determine such an implementation strategy by involving all important stakeholders in a value-driven dialogue on what the technology should accomplish. This idea also seems promising to eHealth, as it can contribute to the whole development of eHealth technology. We therefore suggest that business modeling can be used as an effective approach to supporting holistic development of eHealth technologies. The contribution of business modeling is elaborated in this paper through a literature review that covers the latest business model research, concepts from the latest eHealth and persuasive technology research, evaluation and insights from our prior eHealth research, as well as the review conducted in the first paper of this series. Business modeling focuses on generating a collaborative effort of value cocreation in which all stakeholders reflect on the value needs of the others. The resulting business model acts as the basis for implementation. The development of eHealth technology should focus more on the context by emphasizing what this technology should contribute in practice to the needs of all involved stakeholders. Incorporating the idea of business modeling helps to cocreate and formulate a set of critical success factors that will influence the sustainability and effectiveness of eHealth technology.