Examining Barriers in a Telehealth Innovation: the Social-system Perspective

Research on IT-based innovations is often limited to technological characteristics or to organizational level analyses. By expanding analysis dimensions, we can gain complementary insights and enlarge the boundaries of theories on IT-based innovations. This study adopts Van de Ven’s social-system perspective to examine a specific telehealth innovation. The analysis is carried out at two levels – the behavior of individual actors or organizations involved and the industrial infrastructure that constitutes the context in which the innovation unfolds. The analysis provides important insights into how the development and adoption of the telehealth innovation interacted with the larger social systems in which it was embedded. Also, the study suggests how Van de Ven’s social-system perspective can help understand the challenges involved in innovating health organizations enabled by IT.