Emerging technologies in healthcare

Impact of Digital Technologies on Innovation and Collaboration: Evidence in Chinese healthcare organisations (DHA2019-38)

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Author/s: Dongmei Cao

Abstract: Digital technologies such as telemedicine, e-health, Artificial Intelligent (AI), and online platform, have started to implement in the global healthcare sector. Chinese healthcare organisations have started the digital transformation to tackle issues such as inefficiency, shortage of clinicians and experts, and the emerging need for the healthcare of the growing elderly population. This study, responding to the urgent call for digital healthcare research, particularly focuses on evidence of digital collaboration and innovation to tackle the healthcare issues in China. Multiple case studies select two hospitals, a healthcare tech company, and a pharmaceutical agency; in-depth interviews with physicians, administrative directors, and digital technology experts is utilised for the primary data collection. Our contributions to knowledge are in two areas. First, we add evidence induced knowledge about what and how digital healthcare technologies are currently implemented in China, in particular about the impact of digital technologies on disruptive innovation and digital collaboration in healthcare organisations. Secondly, our results provide insights into the implementation and dissemination of digital technologies to solve some emerging healthcare issues in China. Results also provide implications for efficiency improvement of the digital healthcare communities, hospitals, and tech companies.

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A Cross-country study of the enablers and obstacles to digital healthcare communications and services (DHA2019-31)

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Author/s: Haytham Siala

Abstract: Electronic and digital health care systems and applications are gathering momentum in the healthcare and portable consumer electronics sectors. An electronic health record (EHR) is a digital real-time version of a patient's paper chart that on request from an authorised user can provide instant and up-to-date accurate information about a patient; however, in light of the recent GDPR regulations, strict security, privacy , and confidentiality laws emerged that restricted the access to patients’ electronic health records to a selected few including the patient and his or her general practitioner or nurse. The EHR database is typically not available for commercial purposes despite the potential long-term and short-term benefits that access to such data could bring to the supply chain.

Digital health care systems and applications manifest in different forms such as private and public cloud websites, mobile websites and apps, and wearable technology. Wearables or wearable technologies are smart electronic devices that can be incorporated into clothing or worn as implants or accessories. Smartwatches and activity trackers, which are a popular form of wearables are experiencing an exponential growth in the consumer electronics market.

This research study will investigate healthcare consumers’ perception of the digital strategies that are adopted by healthcare providers and as a result, the findings of this study will help healthcare providers gain a better understanding of the enablers and obstacles to the adoption of digital health services. A miscellany of theories including stakeholder theory will be drawn from the literature to underpin the research questions in this study. A mixed method approach will be adopted in this cross-country research study to ascertain the type of digital communications and strategies that are considered by healthcare consumers to be both effectual and non-intrusive. The empirical settings involve a sample of British and Chinese healthcare consumers participating in an interactive experiment where they will be trialling a set of digital healthcare services and communications that they will receive from their healthcare providers through different digital technologies and devices. The interactive scenarios will include pull and push communication strategies such as participants accessing a desktop and mobile website in a private cloud and participants receiving personalised SMS, emails and notifications through mobile apps and wearable technologies. At the end of the experiment, an online survey questionnaire (n=550) and semi-structured interviews (n=115) will be used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from the participants to verify the research questions and hypotheses that are postulated in this research study.

The findings from this research study will have key implications on the future of digital healthcare services in China and the UK but these findings could potentially extrapolate to other countries across the globe. Private and public healthcare providers will benefit from a better understanding of whether healthcare consumers are willing to try and adopt non-traditional healthcare services, where available and consequently, the perception and expectations held by healthcare consumers will help shape and redefine the digital communication strategies of how they prefer to engage at each stage of care. This research study will conclude with a list of practical recommendations that will guide health care providers on how to leverage on and adapt non-traditional digital healthcare services to different circumstances and needs of healthcare consumers and consequently as a by-product, how to reduce pressure and improve the efficiency of healthcare services.

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Building collective partnerships for service innovation in e-health information infrastructure: from institutional logics’ perspective (DHA2019-32)

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Author/s: Jiang Yu, Jing Jin, Robin Williams and Yue Zhang

Abstract: Service innovation in public issues often lacks of encouragement for diverse actors. Case study evidence from a longitudinal inductive analysis of China’s e-health information infrastructure (II) development is applied, which proposes the institutional logics as a potential approach to build collective partnerships in II development. The e-health II in China was patterned closely related to its collective partnerships shaped by the trend following institutions where we address that the unravelling logics include existing-priority, scale-priority, correlation-priority and value proposition logic, and the evolving logics is continual circular-interacted logic among the institutional and partnerships’ changes. Thus, insights and implications for II development and public service innovation research and practice are then provided.

 

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Developing a Textual Data Mining Classifier to Analyze the Resource Consumption of Common Diseases in Taiwan's Surgical Department (DHA2019-11)

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Author/s: Yuan Huei Huang and Che-Wei Chang

Abstract: This research develops a textual data mining classifier to analysis the Taiwan National Health Research Institute commissioned by the National Health Research Institute to issue a health insurance big data database since 2000. Through the data of common surgical disease diagnosis codes in the database, to understand the age of occurrence of these diseases, the length of hospital stay, the cost of hospitalization, the cost of surgery, etc., to explore the rationality of the allocation of disease resources in the surgical department, and to provide reference for the health care bureau to formulate medical resource allocation policies. The results find that although the resources allocated to surgical patients increased, but the increase was not as great as other specialists. It is suggested that the ratio of surgical inpatient medical resources should be appropriately increased to avoid the loss of surgical manpower due to the unmatched income.

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Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records: Exploring Three Modes of Knowledge and the Role of Absorptive Capacity (DHA2019-29)

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Author/s: Caifeng Zhang, Rui Ma and Shuyang Li

Abstract: Many hospitals in China are suffering from ineffective use of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) to generate high-quality information for decision making. Organizational learning has been a key role in improving the meaningful use of EHRs. Drawing on the knowledge-based view and organizational learning theory, we investigate how the three modes of knowledge can achieve meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) and whether the effect of absorptive capacity matters for the successful adoption of EHRs. To test the associations in the proposed research model, we surveyed 1090 healthcare workers of a large hospital in China in 2019. Structural equation modelling was used to examine relationships between knowledge mode of EHRs, absorptive capacity, and meaningful use of EHRs. The moderating effect of absorptive capacity was examined with the Hierarchical multiple regression. This study contributes to the existing digital health literature by (1) identifying three modes of knowledge – knowing-what, knowing-how, and knowing-why – pertinent for shaping meaningful use of EHRs, and (2) exploring the moderating effect of absorptive capacity to the relationship between knowledge modes and outcomes of adoption.

 

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Exploring user’s willingness to disclose personal information on online medical platform: the role of privacy concern (DHA2019-27)

Author/s: Shiwei Sun, Jin Zhang, Shuhui Chen and Mian Jiang

Abstract: Online medical platform has become people's essential choice to seek medical service. On the one hand, online medical platform can help users reduce time and treatment cost. On the other hand, individuals face the threat of leaking private medical information. The paper considers satisfaction as one factor that may affect user’s willingness to disclose personal information. Using survey approach, this study discusses the factors, the security control of platform, perceived usefulness, satisfaction, information sensitivity, privacy concern in platforms and users’ trust in platforms that may influence users’ willingness to disclose personal information. The results indicate that user’s concern on online medical platform does not produce a negative impact on the willingness to disclose personal information. This may be caused by people’s higher willingness to save cost through online medial platform, although they have larger risk of personal medical information leakage. The findings provide implications for theory and practice.