Digital Strategies For Disrupting Healthcare Systems
Full course description
The module ‘Digital Strategies for Disrupting Healthcare Systems’ is the third module within the learning line Adoption of Digital Technology in Healthcare. In this module, students will zoom out to adopt a digital driven socio-technical systems perspective and learn how to design digital strategies for innovating systems delivering healthcare. This module builds on the learning of digital transformation (module 2) and sense-making by organisations and users (module 4) and extends this knowledge to an ecosystem level. The module is based on the fact that the disruptive and transformative nature of digital technologies blur traditional boundaries of organisations and individuals and disrupt the delivery of healthcare services. To take advantage of these opportunities, students need to develop a wider perspective, i.e., of the entire ecosystems, in which new actors might appear or existing relationships erode, and reimagine the ways of organising health services.
Digital technologies offer novel opportunities for intertwining healthcare organisations but also for involving patients in care processes and in the workflow, enabling horizontal and feedback coordination. Machines are replacing professionals in routine and non-routine work and new types of health professions are emerging. To fully exploit these opportunities, organised systems in healthcare must be able to cope with these technical features by optimising technical and social features.
The module employs design theory of socio-technical systems to integrate both social and technical aspects, resulting in more effectively digital driven organised systems. Digitalization is ambivalent with regard to management and decision-making capability. On the one hand, digital technology allows for systematic monitoring and power-related control; on the other hand, they allow for decentralised decision-making and trust-based control. Considering these trade-offs, the module ‘Digital Strategies for Disrupting Healthcare Systems’ enables students to develop digital strategies for disrupting healthcare delivery systems. For strategy development, students adopt the role of an actor such as a hospital provider, medical equipment or a start-up and develop strategic options to operate in the ecosystem. Role plays of board room decisions facilitate learning about resources, capabilities, customer value propositions, revenue streams, policy changes, competitors and partners and their implications for decision making.
Course objectives
The specific course objectives are:
Expert:
The student is able to:
- Identify and discuss different stakeholders, their capabilities and potential conflicts as well as their interaction within the healthcare ecosystem.
- Understand the concept of corporate culture and its importance for digital health.
- Understand and use knowledge on potential organisational structures (e.g., platform economy) and newly established roles for the successful transformation into a digital healthcare organisation.
- Recognize the role of top management for developing a digital strategy and transforming the healthcare organisation.
- Describe how the co-creation process can guide the innovation management within (digital) health organisations.
Investigator
The student is able to:
- Evaluate and consider different stakeholder perspectives when developing a digital innovation strategy.
Recommended reading
● Hovenga, Evelyn (2022), “Transforming Health Care,” in: Roadmap to Successful Digital Health Ecosystems, Evelyn Hovenga and Heather Grain (eds.), 1st ed., 1-16, Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/C2020-0-00424-X ● Schiavone, Francesco, Daniela Mancini, Daniele Leone, Domenica Lavorato (2021), “Digital Business Models and Ridesharing for Value Co-creation in Healthcare: A Multi-stakeholder Ecosystem Analysis,” Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 166 (2021), 120647. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120647 ● Blumenthal, David (2017), “The Critical Skills for Leading Major Change in America’s Health System,” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/10/the-critical-skills-for-leading-major-change-in-americas-health-system ● Pedersen, Carsten Lund (2022), “Cracking the Culture Code for Successful Digital Transformation,” MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/cracking-the-culture-code-for-successful-digital-transformation/ ● Lobschat, Lara, Benjamin Mueller, Felix Eggers, Laura Brandimarte, Sarah Diefenbach, Mirja Kroschke, and Jochen Wirtz (2021), “Corporate Digital Responsibility,” Journal of Business Research, 122, 875-888. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.10.006