Digital Telehealthcare Services: Exploring Future Designs for Innovative and Sustainable Service Business Models

The rising elderly demographic in the UK represents a significant challenge in terms of planning for the efficient use of increasingly expensive and constrained health and care resources. Digital technology-enabled assistive living health and care (Telehealthcare) services could potentially serve to address the problem. Review of academic and practice literature suggests that one of the key barriers of large scale adoption of Telehealthcare technologies remains lack of evidence around 'business cases', creating enough value for all the stakeholders involved. Drawing perspectives from the literature on business model and service innovation, we adopt a value-driven approach that focuses around both value creation and value capture for key stakeholders and explores opportunities for value co-production with service users, network partners, collaborators and regulators to design future Telehealthcare service business models. Using a single case study with exploratory and interpretive focus, we empirically contextualise our value-driven investigative framework and present our findings that recognise critical needs for resource recombination and integration across the service ecosystem – such as the need for information flows and governance across the service ecosystem towards an integrated health and care information infrastructure.