Abstract

A central challenge for healthcare is technology innovation. The literature has reported on the many challenges to IT innovation efforts in hospitals and in digital health services in general. Recently, the increased use of mobile apps, personal devices, web interfaces – so-called lightweight technology – has introduced a novel innovation logic where recombinability seems to emerge as a core capability to enable innovation. However, we still know little about how recombinability supports digital innovation in healthcare. Specifically, we explore the recombinability of lightweight technologies in the con- text of digital innovation for patient-centeredness. Our research builds on a comparative analysis of two case studies in Scandinavia. The two cases show that recombinability is crucial to enable personalization and the collaborative management of illness between patient and healthcare and it entails reorganizing the healthcare practice. In addition, the findings show that the logic of recombinability was in both cases bounded by the patient and healthcare practice. We discuss bounded recombinability as a logic to maximize the value of digital innovation for a local practice.

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