Theme e-Health

Our expert group has the knowledge and expertise to support the sustainable application and implementation of technological innovations. Our mission with our research is to generate essential knowledge that contributes to the permanent and effective use of the possibilities of e-Health and ensures that e-Health can benefit all those involved in healthcare.

We contribute to a better understanding and application of e-Health among stakeholders by sharing scientific knowledge, through guest lecturerships, lectures at other faculties and universities, presentations at conferences, and on our website and social media channels. We are also easily accessible, feel free contact us to explore opportunities for collaboration and collective research.

There is a wide range of e-Health applications and initiatives. Various technologies are used within e-Health, such as artificial intelligence, sensors, and blockchain. The success of e-Health is only partly determined by the technical design of an individual application. Of critical importance is the way in which technology is deployed, integrated and adopted within existing and new care models. The ultimate goal of e-health applications is improving preventive and curative care in terms of population health, cost control, (perceived) quality of care/the support of healthcare professionals.

The research topics we deal with are care capacity and continuity, design criteria for e-Health, implementation and adoption strategies, monitoring of substitution and quality effects. Below we discuss how and in which phases our research can contribute todevelopments in the field.

Care professionals are under pressure, both with regard to the available capacity and in terms of sustainable employability. This stresses the importance of firstly investigating under what conditions and in what way e-Health can contribute to reducing the workload and improving the working experience. In this light, it is striking that it is not always clear whether an e-health application leads to the substitution of existing care or to complementary care.

AI and robots in care

One technology whose substituting and complementary use we study is AI, specifically the use of service robots in health and elderly care. Investigating the factors that drive and hinder the acceptance of these robots is crucial for their successful and effective implementation. As acceptance and resistance may co-occur, leading to ambivalent reactions to eHealth, we study how such reactions may be managed.

Our work as e-Health group also includes the development, implementation and evaluation of digital interventions that for example use smartphone applications or online programs aimed at improving the (mental) health of the broader public or employees within an organization. Another post-implementation theme is the emergence and monitoring of unintended consequences of implemented digital interventions for clients and professionals, such as coping with both positive and negative workarounds in the use of, for example, electronic health record systems and related applications.

Multidisciplinary business research can have an added value at every stage of the life cycle of individual e-health innovations:

• In raising awareness of how technology could contribute to solving shortcomings and problems in healthcare. A one-sided 'technology push' must be avoided. The 'demand pull' can be reinforced by diagnostic research aimed at uncovering the causes of bottlenecks in current care performance and finding the starting points to increase the value for patient (care). Can technologies that have become available enable other, better models of care? How can a vision on 'blended care' be developed and which type of e-Health fits within it?

• When mobilizing stakeholders to implement e-Health, it is important to systematically explore the stakeholder landscape, as well as to analyze the facilitating and hindering in- and external factors and the resulting risks. Think of hard preconditions such as legal procedures, funding, interoperability, but also of aligning interests.

• The design of e-Health involves a two-sided coordination between the technological application on the one hand and the organizationand routines of the actors in healthcare on the other. This alignment often requires iterative design cycles with enough design space and sufficient time for the intended user groups, patients as well as caregivers, to appropriate the application. With design science, this process can be supervised and supported.

• When implementing e-Health, the responses of the intended users can be monitored at the individual and group level to get feedback and achieve effective adoption.

• Systematically evaluating and monitoring the effects of the deployment of e-Health applications and discussing the implications can help to achieve integration with the existing systems, processes and roles, as well as their optimization. Finally, it is important to pay attention to the assurance. The attention should not dissipate, especially in the period after the implementation (an understandable, but classic mistake).