JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In remote areas, Connected Health (CH) is needed, but as local resources are often scarce and the purchasing power of residents is usually poor, it is a challenge to apply CH there. Stakeholder analysis is employed to facilitate strategy formation, as it can generate knowledge about how the characteristics of stakeholders influence decision-making processes and what relevant actors’ behaviour, intentions, and interrelations are.

Objective:

The objective of this study is to explore who the CH stakeholders are in remote areas of Taiwan and what their interests and power are in order to determine ideal strategies for applying CH by exploring the respective unknowns and discovering insights for those facing similar issues.

Methods:

An exploratory approach was conducted involving semi-structured interviews with 15 participants from four remote allied case studies. The interviews explored perspectives on stakeholder arrangements, including the power and interests of stakeholders and the needs of all the parties in the ecosystem.

Results:

Results include who the stakeholders of remote health are and how they influence its practice, as well as how associated agreements bring competitive advantages. Stakeholders cover government sectors, industrial players, academic researchers, users, and their associates, who described their perspectives on their power and interests in remote health service delivery. Specific facilitators and barriers to effective delivery were identified. A number of themes were corroborated across rural and remote services. These have been broadly grouped into the disclosure of conflicts of interest, asymmetry in decision making, and data development for risk assessment.

Conclusions:

This study contributes to current knowledge by exploring the features of CH in remote areas and investigating its implementation in the context of Taiwan. From a practical standpoint, this study indicates that the government should establish a platform and infrastructure in the CH environment in order to promote a patient interaction pathway, in whose design academia can assist the government based on the findings of this research. It is suggested that the industry should apply technology in promoting and delivering care to the CH target market segment by absorbing the principles of business strategy and integrating their offerings with the target segment’s expectations.