A regulatory framework for pervasive e-health: a case study

To facilitate superior healthcare delivery and address current challenges faced by healthcare today, a plethora of pervasive e-health solutions are emerging. However, existing regulatory regimes are ill-equipped for dealing with them. This not only causes frustration to various stakeholders including patients, providers, healthcare organizations and payers, not to mention vendors but also means that the most appropriate solution cannot be accessed and used. Hence this exploratory study serves to investigate institutional regulatory factors that can impact the adoption of such pervasive e-health solutions. These factors are important as they can shape both the nature of these solutions and their diffusion trajectory. We argue that co-regulation, a mixture of direct monitoring and intervention of regulators through legislation and complete industry self-regulation, can be an effective approach especially in view of the complex and dynamic nature of this industry, co-regulation can minimize monitoring costs and enhance compliance. We illustrate with a case vignette.