Ton Spil*, Assistant professor, Enschede, Netherlands Track: Research Presentation Topic: Business modelling in eHealth Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MECC Room: Auditorium 2 Date: 2010-11-30 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Last modified: 2010-09-21

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Background: E-Health initiatives are taking shape and more and more are moving out of the pilot phase into production. An interesting question is whether there is any commonality in the business models they are using to make the initiative economically viable in the long run. An analysis can even provide them with information on the expected viability and be the basis for advice on how to change the business model

Objective: The aim is to uncover patterns and trends in the exploitation of E-Health initiatives, by answering the following questions for each of the cases studied:
1. What is the purpose and content of the initiative?
2. Who is responsible for starting the initiative?
3. Where does the financing for the initiative come from?
4. What are the major incentives and hurdles for further adoption
a. Financially
b. Organizationally
c. Technically
d. Service delivery
5. What role do external factors play in further adoption
a. Legal and regulatory factors
b. Customer (market) factors
c. Competition (market) factors
d. Supplier (market) factors

Methods: The research takes a case study approach in which six e-health innovation cases will be described and analysed from a business modeling perspective:
1. Babycam in a hospital
2. Videophone in an institute for mentally handicapped people
3. Pal4, a Personal Assistant for Life with Diabetes
4. Telefysiek, a teleconsultation service for physical rehabilitation networks
5. Digital Outpatient clinics in a university medical center
6. Everybody first aid from the Dutch Learning Company

The description and analysis is based on the Osterwalder model for business innovation modeling and the STOF model for business models. These two models provide the means to address the objectives of this research.

More specifically we will study the aspects as listed in table 1.

Dimensions Aspects Description
1. Product/ service Value proposition The products and services that are provided.
2. Interaction with clients Segments Segments of clients and selection.
Channels How does the innovation reach it’s clients?
Relations What kind of relationships does this innovation have with clients?
3. Infrastructure Value creation How does the innovation create value?
Competences What competences need to be there to execute this successfully?
Partner network How does this innovation operate in a network?
4. Financial
Costs structure Status quo on costs.
Revenue model What revenues does this innovation generate?
5.Technology Hardware
Software
Communication Is the end user ready for the different technologies?
6.Organisation Strategy
Structure
Culture Is there a fit with the end user organisation?
7. Effort Capability
Time (acquisition, operations& maintenance and complementary) What effort does the end user have to do to be able to use it?
8. Environment Market
Investments
Stakeholders
Technology How dynamic and complex is the environment?
Table 1: Operationalisation of the business model
Results: The outcome of this exploratory research is not available at the time of submission of this abstract. However, initial research by the authors on the construction of the research model has provided promising results.

Conclusions: Our conclusions will focus on commonalities in the business models employed by E-Health initiatives and on identified barriers and pitfalls in the construction of a viable business model for E-Health initiatives.