Dahlem International Network Junior Research Groups: Overview

The funding line „Dahlem International Network Junior Research Groups“ draws on Germany’s federal excellence initiative II to equip and fund Assistant Professorships (“Juniorprofessor”) as well as research associates. The Information Systems Department succeeded in winning one such grant for the proposal “Health-IT and Business Model Innovation”.

The Junior Research Group “Health-IT and Business Model Innovation“ at the Information Systems Department (School of Business and Economics; Freie Universität Berlin)

There is wide scholarly agreement that health information technologies (Health-IT) improve the quality of health services in important ways; especially regarding knowledge sharing for coping with the ever increasing spread of chronic diseases. The new Junior Research Group looks at how the technological advancements in the area of Health-IT development can be linked with business model innovation to facilitate the diffusion of Health-IT into medical practice. The rich project portfolio at the Information Systems Department provides this Junior Research Group numerous anchors for their studies. Moreover, the group’s theoretical agenda is to advance the scholarly conversation at the intersections of Information Systems Research and Organization Theory. Thus, the installment of this group is an important complement to the empirical work on health care innovation that is carried out at the School of Business and Economics as part of the Focus Area DynAge.

Project duration:	Six years (2014 until 2020)
Contact:	Prof. Dr. Martin Gersch
Funding:	Research budgets provided by the Freie Universitaet Berlin as part of Germany’s federal Excellence Initiative II by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Project partners:	Several academic institutions like the Schools of Math-ematics and Computer Sciences as well as Education and Psychology at the Freie Universitaet, Charité Berlin, Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Göttingen, Hannover Medical School Moreover, research partners include the Competence Center E-HEALTH at the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, HealthCapital Berlin and the Federal Association of Managed Care (Bundesverband Managed Care e.V.)
Goal/Research question:	Despite the far-reaching consensus that Health-IT can substantially improve the quality of care services, the diffusion of information and communication technologies into medical practice is still stagnant. Given societal challenges such as demographic change and the ever increasing spread of chronic diseases, it seems important to understand both the potentials of Health-IT as well as the barriers to its diffusion. Recent advances show that innovative business models are central to facilitate the diffusion of Health-IT. The Junior Research Group is devoted to understanding how such business models can be developed and how the barriers to their diffusion can be overcome. The group’s empirical work, will also advance extant academic work on the intersections of Information Systems Research and Organization Theory.