Towards innovative business modeling for sustainable eHealth applications

Modern day healthcare is offering more and more treatment alternatives on the Internet, so-called eHealth. In order to reform the business logic of these organizations from the traditional healthcare services towards more eHealth in their services, an implementation strategy is needed to guide this reformation. A currently popular approach to guide these reformations and to come to an eventual implementation is by the use of business models. This paper describes what business models are and what their potential for designing and implementing eHealth applications can be. Also, three recent methods of business modeling that aimed to create sustainable eHealth applications will be described as an example, followed by some potential complications and their corresponding challenges that can appear when working on a business model for innovative eHealth applications.