Petri Ahokangas

Background: Health care service providers face increasing challenges in delivering high-quality care due to an aging population, workforce shortages, and limited financial budgets. Mobile Integrated Healthcare (MIH) offers an alternative value-based solution for elderly patients with manageable acute conditions at home. Finland is piloting this model, but its value, task redesign, and cost-efficiency require thorough evaluation before formal integration. Purpose: This study explores the value of MIH for patients and the health care system through the lens of value creation, delivery, and capture. Methods: Qualitative data were collected via semistructured interviews with 21 frontline health care professionals (HCPs) involved in Finland’s MIH service. Results: MIH provides human-centered acute care for the elderly, enabling convenient access to emergency services at home and reducing unnecessary hospital visits. Value is cocreated through integrated networks of emergency and social services, leveraging paramedics’ and geriatric nurses’ expertise while standardizing care pathways. Effective implementation requires coordination and task-shifting across emergency departments, MIH teams, and social care providers. Conclusions: MIH enhances care quality, supports elderly independence, and contributes to the sustainability of the health care system by reducing emergency interventions and hospitalizations. Practical Implications: Health managers should prioritize skill development for health care professionals (HCPs), integration across governance, service, HCPs, and patient levels, and the establishment of coordinated information systems. This study offers policymakers a valuable example of how MIH can be organized within a collective, publicly funded health care system to promote equity, accessibility, and sustainability for value-based health care.

In this paper, we present a scenario-based method for identifying stakeholders’ insights for sustainable digital healthcare by leveraging future digital healthcare scenarios and changing social sustainability drivers. This study aims to propose a scenario-based stakeholder insight method to support the development of inclusive and socially sustainable digital healthcare futures. The first eleven change drivers associated with social sustainability were extracted from the digital healthcare literature and presented to various stakeholders to rank their impact and predictability regarding the social sustainability of digital healthcare. Moreover, the proposed method is also designed to extract insights from stakeholders regarding the implementation of different future scenarios, (i) the consequences of various future scenarios, (ii) the risks and challenges of achieving the future scenarios, and (iii) recommendations for policymakers. The study’s stakeholders include medical doctors, digital healthcare researchers, developers, and digital health-related businesses. The results present the most decisive, impactful, and predictable scenario as “connected care for all,” an inclusive digital healthcare system accessible to all without digital exclusion. Moreover, results show the most impactful and uncertain change driver, as rated by stakeholders. The proposed method can be used to understand stakeholders’ social sustainability requirements, leading to a sustainable digital healthcare future.

Technologically enabled smart hospitals are emerging as a future trend in modern healthcare, yet their objectives and the role of advanced connectivity such as 6G remain unclear. This study explores the concept of smart hospitals and their aims for future patient care from technological, business, and regulatory perspectives, considering diverse stakeholder viewpoints. To address this, we propose a five-layered “C-service” business model for deploying 6G systems to support smart hospital objectives. The connectivity layer ensures ultra-reliable, low-latency communication for real-time monitoring and telemedicine. The computing layer enables distributed edge processing for rapid decision-making and immersive applications such as AR-assisted surgery. The content layer leverages integrated sensing and communication capabilities in 6G to facilitate secure transmission of medical data and imaging. The context layer interprets this data through AI-driven analytics and digital twinning, supporting personalized care and predictive diagnostics. Finally, the commerce layer integrates multi-layered communication and data platforms for efficient healthcare transactions, reducing administrative burdens and enabling new business models for value-based care. By minimizing hospital admissions through proactive health management, 6G-enabled smart hospitals empower patients and seamlessly integrate services across physical and virtual environments. This framework highlights how next-generation connectivity can transform healthcare delivery, improve operational efficiency, and create sustainable business models for future smart hospitals.

Background: In recent years, increasing numbers of elderly people and cuts to the health budget have led health care providers to search for alternative plans to balance the quality of care and the health budget. HaH is growing as an alternative model for hospital wards, with the emergence of its own value chain activities and digitalization as a differentiated strategy to provide cost-effective services. Purposes: The aim of this study is to explore the value of digitalization in the hospital-at-home (HaH) value chain in Finland. This qualitative study used both deductive and inductive methods to map the HaH value chain and find out how digitalization can help improve value-added activities. Methodology/Approach: In total, 25 semistructured single and paired interviews from all well-being service counties in Finland were carried out in September to October 2023. Findings: This study highlights the value of data interoperability, remote and real-time digital solutions, data analytics in enhancing coordination and efficiency, optimizing service delivery, improving patient experience, and supporting cost-effectiveness across the HaH value chain. Practical Implications: This study provides HaH leaders with an overview of what, where, and how digitalization can improve the quality of care and highlights the strategic importance of investing in digital infrastructure and leveraging digitalization to restructure costs. It also offers ICT companies actionable insights into the specific digital care needs within HaH service delivery, guiding the development of digital health solutions that align with frontline requirements and fostering cocreation in digital health and communication technologies.

Extant research falls short of explaining and predicting business model innovation (BMI) in emerging futuristic technology contexts. Building on next-generation mobile communications technology (6G), this research develops and explicates a forward-looking business model theory. It explains and theorizes BMI by systematically linking opportunity with scalability, value with sustainability, and advantage with replicability as antecedents and outcomes. The developed business model theory shifts the focus from the firm towards an ecosystem level of analysis and expands the time continuum from retrospection to forward-looking prediction. The business model theory allows researching BMI not only as an adaptation in a context but also by explaining and understanding the development of a firm and its future ecosystem.

This paper aims to understand the value-added services that the future 6G-enabled metaverse can and will bring to hospitals. This is important since most studies on 6G and the metaverse are heavily driven by technological solutions. Adopting a qualitative research approach, this paper collects experts’ opinions on the usage scenarios of the 6G-enabled metaverse in hospitals. Six use cases within hospital contexts have been identified from open-ended interviews. The analysis of each case reveals that 6G, as a general-purpose technology, offers the necessary capabilities to support the development of the metaverse in hospitals. The metaverse-enabled services are expected to design future smart hospitals and improve work processes and resource allocation in hospitals, while also promoting preventive healthcare and training and enhancing the quality of care in emergency, treatment, and rehabilitation. Consequently, the development of both metaverse and 6G will progress in tandem, hand in hand, offering local services in hospitals. From a value perspective, this paper contributes to the development of the 6G and metaverse in the hospital vertical by understanding the needs, capabilities, and key values of the future 6G-enabled hospital metaverse.

In recent decades, the concept of a business model (BM) has attracted much attention as a strategic tool for understanding firm competitiveness. As organisations face increasing complexities and uncertainties, assessing performance of BMs has become increasingly important for understanding how firms can leverage their strengths, address weaknesses, and adapt to changing industry dynamics. However, assessing BMs' performance presents inherent challenges due to multifaceted dimensions and quantification complexities, as well as the absence of well-defined and appropriate performance indicators. This study thus responds to the recent calls for research on assessing BMs' performance by proposing an assessment framework using two BM outcomes, scalability and replicability, as potential performance indicators. Using an Electric Commercial Vehicle (ECV) ecosystem as a case study, we employ an assessment framework, exploring the determinants of scalability and replicability in ECV BMs, which are then categorised as technical, economic (or business-oriented), and regulatory. This paper contributes to the emerging BM literature by proposing scalability and replicability as two performance indicators for a comprehensive understanding of BM performance. It further illuminates both concepts of scalability and replicability, concluding with practical implications for managers designing scalable and replicable BMs.

This chapter examines future scenarios of 6G at different levels of analysis. The chapter starts by identifying and assessing key change political, environmental, social, technological, and legal forces—trends and uncertainties—related to future mobile communications and proposes a set of dimensions according to which we may expect 6G to change the world. Based on the proposed dimension, the chapter presents a set of future scenarios related to mobile connectivity integrated with various services at the user (humans and machines), business (service provisioning and utilization), business ecosystem value chain (upstream and downstream), and geopolitical levels of analysis. The chapter concludes by presenting the future of mobile connectivity and its potential outcomes at the societal level.