Connected Health: An Open Innovation Perspective

The concept of connected health has gained traction in recent years as a new technology enabled and networked model of health care delivery. It is often used as an umbrella term for eHealth, digital health, health informatics, telemedicine, mHealth and involves the establishment and management of a network of stakeholders with the aim of improving health care quality and outcomes. Yet a lack of open interactions and knowledge networks and the missing integration of the larger constituency of interdisciplinary experts are limiting the execution of the model and restricting its potential to devise services and interventions around patient’s needs with shared health related data. Drawing parallels between the concept of connected health and open innovation, the networked innovation model, which involves efficient management of knowledge flows and complex networks for successful innovations; in this paper we outline the practice of open innovation in health care and suggest connecting stakeholders in the health care ecosystem in an open innovative format. In doing so we present a categorization of firms in the health care ecosystem into open innovation profiles for getting connected and propose an open innovative framework for maximizing the potential of the concept of connected health.