Searching for Sustainability in Health Systems: Toward a Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Mobile Health Innovations

Florence Degavre, Suzanne Kieffer, David Bol, Rémi Dekimpe, Charlotte Desterbecq, Thibault Pirson, Georgiana Sandu and Sandy Tubeuf
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Florence Degavre: Institute for the Analysis of Change in History and Contemporary Societies, Université Catholique de Louvain, UCLouvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
Suzanne Kieffer: Institute for Language and Communications, UCLouvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
David Bol: Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, UCLouvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
Rémi Dekimpe: Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, UCLouvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
Charlotte Desterbecq: Institute of Health and Society, UClouvain, 1200 Bruxelles, Belgium
Thibault Pirson: Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, UCLouvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
Georgiana Sandu: Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, UCLouvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-17

Abstract: Mobile health (mHealth) innovations are considered by governments as game changers toward more sustainable health systems. The existing literature focuses on the clinical aspects of mHealth but lacks an integrated framework on its sustainability. The foundational idea for this paper is to include disciplinary complementarities into a multi-dimensional vision to evaluate the non-clinical aspects of mHealth innovations. We performed a targeted literature review to find how the sustainability of mHealth innovations was appraised in each discipline. We found that each discipline considers a different outcome of interest and adopts different time horizons and perspectives for the evaluation. This article reflects on how the sustainability of mHealth innovation can be assessed at both the level of the device itself as well as the level of the health system. We identify some of the challenges ahead of researchers working on mobile health innovations in contributing to shaping a more sustainable health system.

Keywords: mobile health; sustainable health system; health technology assessment; life-cycle assessment; eco-design; transformative innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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