Business Modeling: The Recipe for E-Health Success in Africa

The world has a new disease: successful e-health pilots that are ended before the actual product or service commercialization phase. It is an epidemic disorder that seems to spread rapidly. This paper searches for a remedy against this disease. By exploring five successful cases where e-health went beyond the pilot phase, we hope to explorer some best practices that may show Africa the way to implementing sustainable e-health innovations. We reached the following results. Theoretically, we found that e-health business model designs can help in explaining the success of specific e-health service innovations but we also found that these models mostly neglect the actual effort needed to create value. When analyzing the cases, we see that the business model concept is often applied in a too late stadium (post ante) and focuses too much on efficiency and not so much on e.g. user experience quality or convenience. These efficiency goals are mostly not met. Practically, we found communalities in the successful projects that can help making future e-health initiatives more successful and sustainable based on which we conclude that the usage of ex ante business model designs that include human capacity, motivation and effort will improve the chance of sustaining e-health initiatives. In Europe, this can be regarded as a luxury challenge but in Africa this is a necessity.