Addressing the dawn of the human-centric personal data market in digital health

The project Legitimation of newness and its impact on EU agenda for change (LNETN), with its over four million euros budget, belongs to the Innovative Training Networks of EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The University of Oulu in Finland, the Aalborg University in Denmark, the Halmstad University in Sweden and the University of Glasgow in Scotland form the project consortium. Moreover, several associated industrial stakeholder partners are also involved, including Bittium and Nokia in Finland.

Altogether fifteen early-stage researcher positions are offered by the project, of which the University of Oulu hosts four. One of these positions deals with the dawn of the human-centric personal data market in digital health and is being hold by Hamideh Saadatmanesh.

She earned her MBA from the University of Isfahan, Iran, and her BSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Yazd, Iran. Her research addresses the emergence and legitimation of practices, dynamics and business models of new business ecosystems in the context of digital health. The results will enhance our understanding of both traditional and modern institutions and businesses within and across emergent digital health ecosystems.

Fueling AI-driven platforms

The research is carried out especially from the viewpoint of service providers in order to help organizations to orchestrate AI-driven ecosystems. There will be implications towards the prerequisites, opportunities and barriers in personal data-based services in a way that transform data center silos as the fuel of AI-driven platforms: “My research explores how new business ecosystems and human-centric personal data co-emerge and are co-legitimated.”

Evolution of newness and legitimation in known and emerging contexts involves patterns of actions and consequences to analyze. New technologies suffer typically from low legitimacy, despite that their developers, business institutions and policy makers would need to invest in them and start making use of them: “So far I have been working on the reconfiguration of AI-driven platforms and their AI-driven business models towards personalized healthcare, to make healthcare available anywhere and anytime for anyone”.

Changing roles of actors and logic of action

Regarding the context of digital health, interesting questions are how patient care pathways influence and co-evolve with business models, how these could be managed and how personalized healthcare ecosystems would evolve. In particular, the distributed ecosystem-based approach will affect the value flow logic across traditional organizational boundaries. The phenomenon can be studied through patient care pathways, to gain insights into patterns of behavior in ecosystems and help creating new business models.

This is also related to anticipating certain types of unintended consequences that can undermine developing, implementing and scaling up activities that engage key actors, through transparent use of data for problem solving and adaptation. Because health care is a complex setting with several different parties, even small changes have the potential to produce large unexpected and unpredictable effects:

Along the same lines, when exploring digital health solutions and services providing companies, one can see a need for offerings that are transforming or have the potential to transform and even disrupt the way in which healthcare has been delivered. Overall, digital or connected health can be characterized as integrating technologies to capturing data and sharing it with patients, care givers and medical experts to support decision making in health care and wellbeing. It is for these reasons that the established roles of actors and logic of action have been changing.

In general, digital health solutions are much targeted to supporting self-care and preventive healthcare, through accessibility to data, solutions and services: “However, the uptake of this calls for appropriate, and flexible business models with appropriate hidden layers which could be linked to technology innovations such as AI and machine learning algorithms”. These would satisfy not only the perceived needs of the market, but also specify who does what and why, and how activities are associated to each other.

The research being carried out by Hamideh Saadatmanesh in connection with the LNETN project which is supervised by Professor Minna Pikkarainen.

More information:

Hamideh Saadamanesh
Hamideh.Saadatmanesh[at]oulu.fi
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