UK Digital Health Platform Market Formation Barriers and Policy Trade-offs

Abstract

Healthcare in the UK is becoming more expensive and less efficient. The from origin public National Health Service has started to invite companies into the system to try and tackle these problems, for example by providing digital health solutions. This privatisation is often viewed by the public as a threat to free healthcare, but also brings significant opportunities. Digital health is suggested to streamline healthcare processes, lower the pressure on healthcare professionals, and provide easy access for healthcare consumers. In its development, the digital health market is facing challenges that need to be overcome to serve its part in healthcare. Taking the case of digital health primary care platforms in Greater Manchester, this research focused on what barriers market actors experience while forming the market and proposes policy trade-offs to tackle these. Frameworks of Boon et al. (2022) and Flanagan et al. (2022) were used to specify the digital health market formation processes and regional industrial policy trade-offs. A Historical Event Analysis (HEA) and interviews were used to gather and analyse data. The HEA clarified the context of the research by connecting events from 2012 to 2022 to market formation indicators and aimed to show an either inhibiting or facilitating function to the process. Interviews were conducted with an interview guide derived from the HEA narrative and aimed to validate and add to the narrative while also exploring the factors that influence developments in the digital health market in relation to the isolated events. The HEA and interview outcomes led to the following barriers: SME and multinational market entry inhibition by strict and changing regulation, expensive and time-consuming evidence gathering value proposition for gaining legitimacy, healthcare digitalisation causes health inequalities to worsen, lack of integration into GPs’ workflow and IT systems as a barrier of adoption, healthcare digitalisation causes health inequalities to worsen, and data usage by companies is ambiguous to the consumer. As of the upcoming implementation of Integrated Care Systems, local actors will increasingly gain legitimacy to exert influence on their region through decision-making in healthcare. This research suggests shifting the attention in policy to a narrower framing of the problem, a more diverse network and customization of the institutions to the actors in digital healthcare.