Grant: Alliance Grants

The digital healthcare landscape is highly fragmented, with health services often designed and offered in isolation from other social, economic, or health services. The main barriers in the Canadian digital healthcare ecosystem are the lack of coordination among providers, patients' inability to choose services and make informed decisions, the rigidity of the market toward digital innovations, and the isolation of providers. Additionally, primary care physicians act as service supply-side monopolists, exerting significantly more power than their service demand-side patients. Transforming the Canadian health system to provide pervasive digital health care to society requires inclusivity and even levels of access to digital health services. Our goal is to develop a software platform called Digital Health Defragmenter Hub, in short DH2, for digital health services. We will answer the research question: How can software platforms integrate open innovation to enable providers in offering personalized services design? As the outcome of developing DH2, we provide enabling technology that makes digital health services more affordable and accessible to a broader population, integrate innovative business strategies for new entrants or low-end consumers, and create a value network where all stakeholders benefit from the prefiltration of innovative technologies. DH2, as a multisided market, is open to digital providers and patients, creates an adaptable value network, and expedites the time to market. In addition, platforms add to the geographic diversity of participants. These features, provide an ecosystem to react faster to radical events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. DH2 is designed around user experience and provides machine learning-based decision support for patients to find alternative digital care solutions. Our proposed DH2 opens the Canadian digital health market to innovative leaders and early adopters, localizing services while assuring structural and peripheral compliance to Canadian standards, and the equal and open access of such a platform can mitigate the risk of discriminative health care. The partnered company committed to contributing 150K CAD in Cash and 465K CAD in-kind contribution over three years.