Samenvatting

eHealth applications hold many promises, for instance to improve the quality of health care, to increase its accessibility, or to reduce its 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 Innovations in Health Care at the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences initiated the project Successful Entrepreneurship in eHealth. The project is a cooperation between 28 parties in The Netherlands: health care providers, patient organizations, health insurance companies, national health care authorities, and 15 eHealth SMEs. 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 the main results and lessons learned are discussed. The evaluation of eHealth innovations was found to be highly context-driven, with parties involved each employing their own criteria. Among the project’s main results is an eHealth innovation map, a diagram showing eHealth SMEs which parties in the Dutch health care system to involve, their roles and their mutual relations, their interests in eHealth innovation, and the kinds of evidence that may convince them of the added value of an eHealth innovation. A set of corresponding fact sheets was developed to provide eHealth SMEs with concise yet easily accessible information for choosing an innovation route and for determining what evidence to collect for relevant stakeholders.