Innovation in Community-Based Private Practices Through eHealth: A Business Management Perspective

Over the last few years, the conviction that the healthcare system, especially in the most developed countries, needs reconstruction and reorganisation has been strengthening among the general population. Health care is a widely dis-cussed topic among health professionals, academics and politicians, and new in-formation technology offers innovative tools that can help to solve the toughest healthcare challenges. Therefore, it is of interest to discuss the crisis in traditional healthcare sys-tems, which are under enormous pressure to provide sustainable and innovative ways of delivering healthcare services and products. As a matter of fact, tradi-tional public health systems now count on the long list of services and products offered by private community-based practices (e.g. pharmacies, hearing centres, opticians and private medical centres). The changes in current healthcare systems are supported by an incredible rev-olution in terms of accessibility and availability of health information on the in-ternet. As a result, the changing role of the patient is strongly linked to the use of information technology. Under such a scenario, the topic of ‘eHealth literacy’ has emerged. There are many definitions of eHealth and no consensus around the underlying idea. It is a widespread concept, applied extensively in modern literature, and publications in this domain are growing rapidly. There have been many important contributions; however, most focus on informatic, public health, legal, social and anthropologi-cal implications. This publication, instead, is aimed at community-based private practice actors, to provide them with research models that explain the reasons why eHealth tools are, or are not, adopted. In this work – focused on services, applications and expected benefits of eHealth – we intend, from a managerial perspective, to (a) investigate how eHealth is currently interpreted and applied in community-based private practic-es, (b) present a systematic review of the theoretical research models that have been developed over the last 10 years on eHealth, (c) identify the many innova-tive managerial implications of eHealth and (d) explore the choices of adop-tion/non-adoption of eHealth applications, such as Telemedicine, through an original research study.