Digital Economy and Innovative Practices in Healthcare Services

In this chapter, the authors analyze the impact of the new ICT-driven economic paradigm—the digital economy—on healthcare services. The increasing adoption of ICT in healthcare has been very fruitful and has led to the innovative approach to healthcare practice commonly known as e-health. Here the authors first propose a framework, consisting of six elements, whose mutual interaction outlines the structure and the dynamics of the digital economy. Then, a classification scheme of services is presented, which considers their characteristics and their delivery modes; this scheme supports understanding the way in which the adoption of ICT impacts healthcare services. Finally, an overall explanatory outline is constructed that allows one to analyze and understand the origins, implications, and future perspectives of the changes that ICT has brought to healthcare services. Examples of e-health applications are traced back to the building blocks of the framework, isolating the impact of each driver on their structure, configuration, and delivery modes.