Designing telemedicine apps that health commissioners will adopt

Marshall, Alison ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6816-2362 (2014) Designing telemedicine apps that health commissioners will adopt. In: IEEE, (ed.) 14th Conference of Open Innovation Association FRUCT. IEEE, ieee.org, pp. 63-68.

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License CC BY-NC Download (406kB) | Preview

Abstract

In countries with a national health service, new telemedicine and telehealth products and services are ‘commissioned’ according to a fairly rigorous and regulated process, that usually involves pilot studies and the assembly of ‘evidence’ to show that the innovation offers performance and/or cost advantages. This is problematic for several reasons and means that many innovations are piloted and performance evaluated, but relatively few pass into mainstream adoption. The current relationship between healthcare commissioners and technology developers is adversarial rather than collaborative. Evaluations and regulatory systems place the responsibility with the developer to prove that the solution works – in other words, to refute the assumption that the solution may not be appropriate. Furthermore, with telemedicine innovations the ‘user’ and the ‘customer’ is not a single individual or organisation – the healthcare professional, the patient (and perhaps carer, family or friends), as well as the organisation itself are all involved. A conventional evaluation ignores the organisationally disruptive aspect of the technology. A better question than ‘does it work?’ would be ‘how can we use it?’ This paper reviews barriers to adoption and considers the particular issues that developers of telemedicine apps need to address. We propose the Stakeholder Empowered Adoption (SEA) Model, as a process that builds stakeholder (staff and patients, managers, technologists) perspectives into the specification and early design stages and uses scenario modelling and simulations to avoid dependence on actual prototypes. The model recognises that the main economic stakeholders (the health organisation commissioning the innovation and the technology provider) need to drive the process, but end users (professionals and patients) are critical to a useful, adoptable end product. Their involvement in the evaluation and adoption process therefore needs to be well managed.

Item Type:	Book Section
Journal / Publication Title:	Conference Proceedings: Open Innovations Association (FRUCT), 2013 14th Conference of
Publisher:	IEEE
ISSN:	2305-7254
ISBN:	9781479949779
Departments:	Research Centres > Cumbrian Centre for Health Technologies (CACHET) Academic Departments > Health, Psychology & Social Studies (HPSS) > Rehabilitation
Additional Information:	Conference proceedings: FRUCT 13th Open Innovation Conference, Espoo, Finland, 11-15 November 2013. Print ISSN 2305-7254.
Depositing User:	Alison Marshall
Date Deposited:	15 Oct 2014 09:20
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2024 12:17
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/1599

Downloads