Transforming the homecare offering scene: How the technology plays a role

Abstract

Digital health receives more and more attention as a solution to reduce the burden of healthcare cost in today's aging society. However, compared to other types of services, digital health service projects seem to have higher rates of stopping at pilot stages and do not get integrated into the actual medical practices. Adopting digital health solutions in today's healthcare settings often requires changes of work processes that can have a significant impact on the work practices of the healthcare professionals. Thus, there is a need for understanding both the current practice and the new proposed practice in service level with a more analytical and systematic approach. We conducted a multiple case study of homecare practices. Shadowing, contextual interviews, customer journey mapping, and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted in homecare settings in Norway and Sweden. Document analysis allowed us to add an additional case (a remote patient monitoring at home) to our study. The results of our study show that several key components of homecare services (service worker, secondary service worker, service interaction type, and sub-service provision context) were dissimilar among different homecare settings without or with a digital health solution. Our study might be useful to gain a deeper insight of homecare services and to understand the key components and the changing actors’ roles to consider when adopting digital solutions to the homecare services.