Innovation Management, Healthcare Challenges and eHealth

Over the past years, the conviction that the healthcare systems, particularly in the most developed countries, need reconstruction and reorganisation has been strengthening. Therefore, it is interesting, in this first chapter, to discuss the crisis facing traditional healthcare systems, which are under enormous pressure to provide sustainable, innovative ways of delivering healthcare services and products. This chapter will focus on the Italian healthcare system and on the relevance in this country of new non-medical health professions, which supply new products and deliver new services. Most of these function as community-based private practices and are proper retailers. Thus, their work contributes to the operation of the National Health System, and they can take advantage of relevant new technological tools that are otherwise available only to the public National Health System. Moreover, the private nature of these practices offers them flexibility and agility, such that they are the first potential beneficiaries by their use of new technological tools. Indeed, an incredible revolution is occurring in terms of the accessibility and availability of health information, products and services through the Internet. As a result, the changing role of the patient is strictly linked to the use of information technology, in the context of the so-called eHealth field, a paradigm that will be discussed based on an extensive literature review, with the aim of defining the current position of the research, managerial and social actions and implications related to eHealth.