Innovation Management in Healthcare Organizations and Systems: Sustainability and Ethics Implications

The last decades have seen profound changes in healthcare management. In particular, massive transformations in prevention, diagnostic and treatment practices have been stimulated by technological innovation, from wearable devices, medical apps, and telemedicine technologies which are seen as means to improve patients’ self-care and, ultimately, change patients’ unhealthy behavior and lifestyles; to “big ticket” health technologies, such as robotic-assisted technologies or 3D printers, which physicians progressively incorporate in clinical practice; to machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence on which hospitals increasingly rely to support complex decision making and organizational processes.

Often, such new technologies are viewed as panacea solutions, able to mitigate healthcare costs, reduce increasingly dramatic health inequities across socio-economic strata, patient groups and geographies, whilst catering to demands for more personalized, patient-centered and affordable care. The COVID-19 public health emergency is underlining the overarching relevance of new medical devices, as healthcare practices and systems worldwide have undergone fast-tracked implementation of digital technologies to enable continuity of medical consultations, strengthen systems’ track&tracing capacity, improve patients’ health awareness and self-management competencies, and contain the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. However, at present we know relatively less about the actual benefits and managerial challenges of introducing a wide array of new technologies in healthcare practices, especially when this happens in conditions of high uncertainty and only partial predictability of treatment effectiveness and benefits. Innovators are currently under tremendous time pressure to develop new devices in response to the pandemic. While this has resulted in dramatically reduced products’ time-to-market, it also has important safety and ethical implications.  

This Special Issue aims to advance current understanding on the managerial implications of new healthcare technologies for healthcare organisations and systems, in particular looking at the sustainability and ethical aspects. We refer to sustainability aspects as defined by the United Nations, hence looking at financial, social and environmental repercussions of innovative medical technology for healthcare organizations and systems. Introducing new medical devices in home and care settings is a complex endeavor, which often imposes high social and financial costs for practitioners and policymakers, implies learning and unlearning dynamics, generates uncertainty and ambiguity for different stakeholders, alters the relationship between patients and physicians and may engender unexpected social, environmental and economic consequences. At the same time, the development of low-cost devices such as MAC 400 portable ECG machines by GE in the Indian context presented a new paradigm for reducing costs, improving quality and enhancing access to healthcare, along the concepts of frugal innovation and reverse innovation. However, creating social, economic and environmental value from innovation also requires the development of entirely new solutions and approaches. The generation of innovative, sustainable business models has thus emerged as a new challenge for managers and organizations. Ethical aspects include, but are not limited to, understanding the effects of technological innovation on health inequities in different contexts; considering the challenges related to the ethical use of the massive amounts of information produced by wearable devices and apps; illuminating the ethical dilemmas associated with the use machine learning and artificial intelligence, as diagnoses, prevention and treatment decisions risk moving away from patient-centred professional assessments. Conceptual and empirical contributions are equally encouraged, as well as studies using qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods technique of enquiry.

Prof. Federica Angeli
Prof. Daniele Mascia
Prof. Anand Kumar Jaiswal
Guest Editors

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• Innovation management
• Sustainability
• Ethics
• Healthcare management
• Healthcare systems
• Health policy