JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Access to healthcare remains a critical challenge, particularly in underserved health systems. Telemedicine, a technology-driven solution offering remote medical services, has the potential to enhance healthcare access. However, it remains primarily studied in high-resource settings and continues to face challenges in adoption and scale-up (diffusion). Insights from frugal innovation could offer valuable contributions to overcome these obstacles, promoting greater affordability and accessibility. Frugal innovation is a resource-scarce solution, typically emerging from extreme constraints, emphasizing affordability, accessibility, simplicity, efficiency, and resourcefulness. Rooted in a culturally contextualized and creative approach to problem-solving, it is particularly relevant in low-resource health systems where complex, inter-sectoral challenges occur. Despite its potential, insights from frugal innovation have not been compared, contrasted, or studied alongside telemedicine.

Objective:

Therefore, we will review the existing literature to analyze how both concepts and their relationships are discussed, comparing and contrasting findings.

Methods:

We will conduct a systematic review of empirical studies of technologies, encompassing both concepts, namely telemedicine features and frugal innovation characteristics, and explore how these features and characteristics affect adoption and diffusion pathways for the studied technologies.

Results:

While we anticipate complementary aspects to arise between both concepts, our focus is to examine their reciprocal relationship and interdependence, while contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of how they impact adoption and diffusion of technology within health systems and communities in extreme resource-limited settings.

Conclusions:

Insights from our review will contribute to a deeper understanding of how to address the challenges related to the adoption and diffusion of innovative health applications in extreme resource-limited settings. Furthermore, we will advance understanding of how frugal innovation characteristics can align with traditional, non-frugal, and more advanced technologies, such as telemedicine, thereby enabling the development of innovation systems that are resource-efficient, contextually adaptive, and yet scalable. Clinical Trial: n.a.