Beyond “Implementation”: Digital Health Innovation and Service Design

Digital tools have shown great potential to enhance health services’ capacity to achieve the goals of the triple aim (enhance patient experience, improve health outcomes, and control or reduce costs), but their actual impact remains variable.

Many digital health innovations show potential to improve health outcomes, reduce health system costs, and improve patient experience, but their impact remains variable and limited in scope. Commentators have addressed a variety of themes related to broader strategies for generating useful health innovations, and implementation science has illustrated a number of key considerations for introducing technologies into new settings of health care delivery. However, despite recent advances in implementation science for digital health, a central component of successful digital health innovation remains largely unaddressed in academic literature: the intimate connection between new digital tools and the changes they necessitate to the actual delivery of health care services. In other words, the inter-relation between product innovation and service innovation for digital health has not been sufficiently acknowledged, contributing to the ongoing challenges of technology adoption in health service delivery settings.