Towards Sustainable Business Models From Healthcare Technology Research

As demographic ageing impacts across the world, health and welfare organisations are seeking new paradigms of care that address people’s needs as well as being inherently more scalable than the incumbent processes and services. The aim of this paper is to describe the current situation in Europe with information on service provision, before signposting some possible new ways to develop sustainable business models that support care models. The paper uses a case study approach to examine the issues in the introduction of such business models, from a perspective of the translation of research proof of concepts into business services and from the perspective of developing innovations from research that address unmet or poorly considered needs of user. The paper shows how several innovative European projects are anticipating the need for service change and are designing their research outcomes to match the needs of service commissioners more fully. The conclusion discusses several different approaches before drawing together strands of the work and providing tentative recommendations on the way forward to develop new inclusive technology-enhanced services in health and social care.