Digital health innovation ecosystems: Identifying key participants, benefits, challenges and guidelines for the Namibian context

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to identify key participants who will participate in transactions carried out in the ecosystem for the Namibian context. This is to identify and describe specific professionals as well as their role in the ecosystem, hence, contributing to the empirical research on participants of a Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem. Another significant contribution of this paper is the identification of the benefits, challenges and presentation of guidelines for implementing a Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem for the Namibian context which would enable the actual implementation of the ecosystem. This paper also supports the strengthening of the MDGs 4,5 and 6 specifically through the Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows; section 2 presents the literature review of Digital Health Innovation Ecosystems. Section 3 describes the research methodology. Section 4 presents the results of the study. Discussions, as well as the guidelines with approaches for implementing a Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem for the Namibian context,, are presented in Section 5. Conclusions are made in Section 6.