Opportunity Exploitation in Mobile Health Entrepreneurship

Mobile health poses an entrepreneurial opportunity for healthcare providers, especially physicians who run their clinics individually or jointly. Based on entrepreneurship literature, this study examines the adoption of mobile health technologies in terms of the factors that influence the decisions of physicians to exploit the opportunity. Compared with other health information technologies, the direct users of mobile health technologies are patients rather than clinicians. Thus this study discusses the important roles that demand-side factors related to patient-centered care play in physicians’ adoption of mobile health technologies. To facilitate future empirical studies, it proposes a research model of mobile health entrepreneurship with testable research propositions. The framework fills the gap in existing technology adoption studies that typically do not differentiate technology adopters and end-users. It also contributes to the entrepreneurship literature that considers mainly the characteristics of entrepreneurs in the investigation of opportunity exploitation.