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Consumers have increased access to digital health tools such as social media, websites and marketer-controlled platforms for information sharing. Telemedicine (TM) represents an emerging omni-channel touchpoint for consumers to exchange information and inform health decision-making at a time and place of their choosing. While TM offers great potential, consumer adoption has been slower than expected. This paper aims to investigate attitudinal factors that influence adoption and usage of TM within consumers’ omni-channel decision-making environment.

Surveys from 869 patients were analyzed using multiple linear regression to examine the relationships between health decision-making, TM access benefits and omni-channel touchpoints (social media, website and internal health digital channels usage) on TM usage likelihood.

Attitudinal constructs related to TM’s benefits including access and health decision-making have the strongest impact on future TM usage. The study also empirically demonstrates a link between consumers’ omni-channel information seeking and TM usage.

Increasing consumers’ involvement across omni-channel touchpoints has an additive effect on perceived benefits for engaging consumers in using digital offerings like TM. Future research is needed that examines the interrelationships on consumers’ health decision-making across generational cohorts and the post-adoption effects of digital service offerings.

Omni-channel touchpoints such as TM provide new opportunities to enhance shared decision-making. However, marketers need to adopt strategies that accommodate consumers’ evolving omni-channel preferences for access and information exchange to synergize digital service offerings with interpersonal touchpoints.

This study integrates shared decision-making, technology acceptance and omni-channel marketing literature to explore TM acceptance and usage within the context of consumers’ omni-channel decision process.

Promoting health literacy, i.e. the ability to access, collect, understand and use health-related information, is high on the health policy agenda across the world. The digitization of health-care calls for a reframing of health literacy in the cyber-physical environment. The article systematizes current scientific knowledge about digital health literacy and investigates the role of health-care organizations in delivering health literate health-care services in a digital environment.

A literature review was accomplished. A targeted query to collect relevant scientific contributions was run on PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. A narrative approach was undertaken to summarize the study findings and to envision avenues for further development in the field of digital health literacy.

Digital health literacy has peculiar attributes as compared with health literacy. Patients may suffer from a lack of human touch when they access health services in the digital environment. This may impair their ability to collect health information and to appropriately use it to co-create value and to co-produce health promotion and risk prevention services. Health-care organizations should strive for increasing the patients’ ability to navigate the digital health-care environment and boosting the latter’s value co-creation capability.

Tailored solutions should be designed to promote digital health literacy at the individual and organizational level. On the one hand, attention should be paid to the patients’ special digital information needs and to avoid flaws in their ability to contribute to health services’ co-production. On the other hand, health-care organizations should be involved in the design of user-friendly e-health solutions, which aim at engaging patients in value co-creation.

This contribution is a first attempt to systematize extant scientific knowledge in the field of digital health literacy specifically focused on the strategies and initiatives that health-care organizations may take to address the limited digital health literacy pandemic.

Despite major progress made in improving the health and well-being of millions of people, more efforts are needed for investment in 21st century health care. However, public hospital waiting lists continue to grow. At the same time, there has been increased investment in e-health and digital interventions to enhance population health and reduce hospital admissions. The purpose of this study is to highlight the accounting challenges associated with measuring, investing and accounting for value in this setting. The authors argue that this requires more nuanced performance metrics that effect a shift from a technical practice to one that embraces social and moral values.

This research is based on field interviews held with clinicians, accountants and administrators in public hospitals throughout Australia and Europe. The field research and multidisciplinary narratives offer insights and issues relating to value and valuing and managing digital health investment decisions for the post-COVID-19 “value-based health-care” future of accounting in the hospital setting.

The authors find that the complex activity-based hospital funding models operate as a black box, with limited clinician understanding and hybridised accounting expertise for informed social, moral and ethical decision-making. While there is malleability of the health economics-derived activity-based hospital funding models, value contestation and conflict are evident in the operationalisation of these models in practice. Activity-based funding (ABF) mechanisms reward patient throughput volumes in hospitals but at the same time stymie investment in digital health. Although classified as strategic investments, there is a limit to strategic planning.

Accounting in public hospitals has become increasingly visible and contested during the pandemic-driven health-care crisis. Further research is required to examine the hybridising accounting expertise as it is increasingly implicated in the incremental changes to ABF in the emergence of value-based health care and associated digital health investment strategies. Despite operationalising these health economic models in practice, accountants are currently being blamed for dysfunctional health-care decisions. Further education for practicing accountants is required to effect operational change. This includes education on the significant moral and ethical dilemmas that result from accounting for patient mix choices in public hospital service provision.

This research involved a multidisciplinary team from accounting, digital health, information systems, value-based health care and clinical expertise. Unique insights on the move to digital health care are provided. This study contributes to policy development and the limited value-based health-care literature in accounting.

The integration of industry 4.0 has become a priority for many organizations. However, not all organizations are suitable and capable of implementing industry 4.0 because it requires a dynamic and flexible implementation strategy. The implementation of industry 4.0 often involves overcoming several tensions between internal and external stakeholders. This paper aims to explore the paradoxical tensions that arise for health-care organizations when integrating industry 4.0. Moreover, it discusses how a paradox lens can support the conceptualization and proposes techniques for handling tensions during the integration of industry 4.0.

This qualitative and in-depth study draws upon 32 semi-structured interviews. The empirical case concerns how two health-care organizations handle paradoxical tensions during the integration of industry 4.0.

The exploration resulted in six recurring technology tensions: technology invention (modularized design vs. flexible design), technology collaboration (automation vs. human augmentation), technology-driven patient experience (control vs. autonomy), technology uncertainty (short-term experimentation vs. long-term planning), technology invention and diffusion through collaborative efforts among stakeholders (selective vs. intensive collaboration) and technological innovation (market maintenance vs. disruption).

A paradox theory-informed conceptual model is proposed for how to handle tensions during the integration of industry 4.0. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to introduce paradox theory for quality management, including lean and Six Sigma.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which digital inclusion functions as a super social determinant of health, particularly within the arena of family carework and healthcare for vulnerable disabled US communities. The focus on vulnerable populations, including the elderly, chronically ill, young disabled, neurodivergent, and/or medically complex children and the families that care for them, is a useful case to present a compelling argument for the need to take seriously digital inclusion to maximize health, safety, and well-being for growing populations of Americans today. The authors argue that digital inclusion is an increasingly influential social determinant of health and a key dimension of health equity that offers important benefits and potentials, especially for vulnerable patient populations, for whom in-home and family-centered care are necessary parts of health maintenance, prevention, and well-being. The chapter ends with a discussion of ways that the US government can mitigate digital barriers and facilitate equitable access to broadband internet and e-health resources that address the intersections of digital, health, and care inequalities, with significant impacts in all three dimensions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care.

A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied.

The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication.

This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care.

The Covid-19 pandemic encourages organized structures across health sectors to react to the outbreak and digital health technologies have been identified as promising pillars to respond to the outbreak across the globe. The purpose of this study is to address the scoping review aimed at identifying the innovative entrepreneurial opportunities in digital health-care ecosystems. The study highlights the barriers to digital health in developing countries. The study is a forum for the introduction of entrepreneurship prospects in the Indian sense through other foreign readers in developing countries.

This archival study highlights topical literature to explore successful ways of improving market potential in developed countries with respect to digital health. The research offers insights into how a digital health environment could be applied, provides a trajectory that concentrates on key skills and a creative approach.

Health service providers require developing their competency and skills to accelerate and enhance their entrepreneurial opportunities. Social network dynamics analyzes are particularly helpful in modeling pandemic trends and in tracking post-pandemic digital health needs. The acceptability of digital solutions has to be confronted across developing countries especially in rural areas and a collective public health benefit in form of entrepreneurship to serve the society.

The research temporarily indicates a creative solution to entrepreneurship in developed countries that can be applied in today’s digital arena.

To raise public understanding of the advantages of digital health systems in developed regions, health education and promotion campaigns should be focused. The idea analysis can be useful benchmarks for policymakers rather than digital health jurisdictions. The post-pandemic provides developed countries a great opportunity for advanced technology to expand connectivity and networking to digital health entrepreneurship.

Digital health care has emerged as one of the most important means to deliver integrated care by care providers in recent years. As the use of digital health increases, there are some pressing issues such as interoperability of data across different healthcare information systems, regulatory environment and security and privacy of patient’s information which need to be discussed and addressed in order to reduce information silos and to ensure efficient and seamless use of digital health technologies. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

In this paper the authors outline the key concepts of interoperability, key challenges pertaining in achieving interoperability and concepts of security and privacy in context of digital health models of integrated care.

The study suggests that standardization of digital health information systems and connecting existing systems to health network, addressing privacy and security related issues through a comprehensive but supportive regulatory environment and educating citizens and healthcare providers are some of the ways to achieve effective use of digital health in models of integrated care.

Although the concepts of privacy and interoperability are not new, however, as per best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to discuss the challenges and possible actions to meet the objective of achieving integrated care through digital innovation.

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has posed challenges for delivering essential and desirable health-care services for the masses. Digital health-care services initiated by several hospitals and health practitioners promise efficient and safe health care in the new normal post-COVID era but need a supportive enabling ecosystem. Therefore, this study aims toward identifying and modeling the key enabling factors for digital health-care services.

A total of nine factors were identified from the literature review and verified by the domain experts which can enable the wider acceptance of digital health-care services. The identified factors were then modeled with the help of the total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) approach and fuzzy Matrices d’Impacts Croises Multiplication Appliquée à un Classement (MICMAC) and a meaningful contextual relationship were developed for the factors.

This study reflects that the trust of patients is required for the acceptance of digital health care. Quality of patient care and affordability cum accessibility of online services will define mass engagement. Hospital staff resilience, hospital care service capacity, strategic partnerships and collaborations supported by technology and regulatory structure are the major factors defining the enabling ecosystem.

This study has its uniqueness in the way the TISM approach and fuzzy MICMAC are used for modeling the enabling factors toward growth and acceptance of digital health-care services in the days to come in developing nations. The focus of this study can be considered as relevant for the study interested in investigating the role of cognitive dimensions in influencing actors’ behaviors and decisions.

An inquiry into the constitution of the experience of patienthood. It understands “becoming a patient” as a production of a subjectivity, in other words as a process of individuation and milieu that occurs through an ontology of production. This ontology of production can, of course, also be understood as a political ontology. Therefore, this is, first of all, an inquiry into a mode of production, and, secondly, an inquiry into its relation to the issue of social justice – because of effects of digital divisions. In these terms, it also reflects on how expert discourses, such as in medical sociology and science studies (STS), can (and do) articulate their problems.

An integrative mode of discourse analysis, strongly related to discursive institutionalism, called semantic agency theory: it considers those arrangements (institutions, informal organizations, networks, collectivities, etc.) and assemblages (intellectual equipment, vernacular epistemologies, etc.) that are constitutive of how the issue of “patient experience” can be articulated form its position within an ontology of production.

The aim not being the production of a finite result, what is needed is a shift in how “the construction of patient experience” is produced by expert discourses. While the inquiry is not primarily an empirical study and is also limited to “Western societies,” it emphasizes that there is a relation between political ontologies (including the issues of social justice) and the subjectivities that shape the experiences of people in contemporary health care systems, and, finally, that this relation is troubled by the effects of the digital divide(s).

A proposal “to interrogate and trouble” some innovative extensions and revisions – even though it will not be able to speculate about matters of degree – to contemporary theories of biomedicalization, patienthood, and managed care.