Samenvatting

EHealth applications hold many promises, for instance to improve the quality of health care, to increase its accessibility, or to reduce the cost. Yet, many eHealth innovations never reach the stage where they get embedded into routine health care. This is due in part to a lack of evidence that these innovations indeed deliver what they promise. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular, collecting convincing evidence for eHealth innovations proves to be a challenge as the available time, resources and expertise to do so are often limited. In response to this challenge, the research group ICT Innovation in Health Care initiated the project Successful Entrepreneurship in eHealth. The project is a cooperation between 24 parties in The Netherlands: eHealth SMEs, health care providers, patient organizations, health insurance companies, and national health care authorities. Its aim is to speed up eHealth innovation by providing eHealth SMEs with guidelines for collecting feasible yet convincing evidence. In this paper the project’s approach is introduced and some preliminary results and lessons learnt are discussed.