Retailing &Service Management (SIMA)

How to keep the momentum and support the Italian NHS adopting innovation and delivering innovative services

Paola Roberta Boscolo, Laura Giudice , Erika Mallarini, Valeria Rappini

 

In the last few weeks, we have witnessed an unprecedented effort to develop technological solutions to respond to the Covid-19 health emergency, with most of the typical barriers to innovation fading. Several studies until now investigated the attributes of healthcare innovations and their determinants (e.g. Fleuren, 2004; Ferlie et al., 2005; Greenhalgh et al, 2004; Robert et al., 2010; Boscolo et al, 2019). Several enablers and barriers to innovation have been recognized and they can simultaneously influence the diffusion and sustainability of an innovation. These include the influences from the external political and institutional contexts, financial incentives for both organizations and individuals to invest on innovation, ICTs, professionalism, power, clinical practices, patients’ choice, decision making processes, etc. Fleuren’s review (2004) identifies determinants belonging to four main domains: the ‘socio-political context’, the ‘adopter organization’, the ‘adopting person – user’, and ‘the innovation’. But, most studies looked at a small number of causal variables to explain adoption and diffusion (Fleuren, 2004), so failing to capture the real complexity behind adoption processes (Rye and Kimberley, 2007). Furthermore, there are almost no studies about the emergence and diffusion of healthcare innovations in times of crisis. The exceptions concern medical advances and key healthcare developments that had their origins in the battlefield and then translated into mainstream solutions, or reverse innovation related to new solutions that were developed in poor and developing countries and later reversed into advanced healthcare systems (e.g. Govindarajan et al., 2012).

 

#adoption #Covid-19 #diffusion #digital #emergency #Healthcare #innovation #technology