Smart Healthcare solutions in China and Europe, an international business perspective

The thesis is part of the Marie Curie Fellowship project addressing health related challenges with IoT solutions. The author tries to address the challenge for the implementation of telehealth solutions by finding out the demand of the telehealth solution in selected European economies and in China (chapter 1), analyzing the emerging business models for telehealth solution ecosystems in China (chapter 2), how to integrate telehealth solutions with institutional stakeholders (chapter 3) and why are elderly users willing to use telehealth solutions in China. Chapter 1 and chapter 2 form the theoretical background for empirical work in chapter 3 and chapter 4. The thesis addressed four research questions, namely “Which societal and social-economics unmet needs that Internet of Healthcare Things can help to resolve?”, “What are the business model innovation for tech companies in China for the smart health industry?”, “What are the facilitators and hurdles for implementing telehealth solutions”, “Are elderly users willing to use telehealth solutions in China?”. Both qualitative study and quantitative analysis has been made based on data collected by in depth interviews with stakeholders, focus group study work with urban and rural residents in China. The digital platform framework was used in chapter 2 as the theoretical framework where as the stakeholder power mapping framework was used in chapter 3. The discretion choice experiment was used in chapter 4 to design questionnaire study while ordered logit regression was used to analyze the data. Telehealth solutions have great potential to fill in the gap for lack of community healthcare and ensuring health continuity between home care setting, community healthcare and hospitals. There is strong demand for such solutions if they can prove the medical value in managing chronic disease by raising health awareness and lowering health risks by changing the patients’ lifestyle. Analyzing how to realize the value for preventive healthcare by proving the health-economic value of digital health solutions (telehealth solutions) is the focus of research. There remain hurdles to build trust for telehealth solutions and the use of AI in healthcare. Next step of research can also be extended to addressing such challenges by analyzing how to improve the transparency of algorithms by disclosing the data source, and how the algorithms were built. Further research can be done on data interoperability between the EHR systems and telehealth solutions. The medical value of telehealth solutions can improve if doctors could interpret data collected from telehealth solutions; furthermore, if doctors could make diagnosis and provide treatment, adjust healthcare management plans based on such data, telehealth solutions then can be included in insurance packages, making them more accessible.