Building a Digital Health Innovation Ecosystem: Tech‐Push, Demand‐Pull, and Government Policy

ABSTRACT Health and social care are at a pivotal point, encountering complex and multifaceted systemic and workforce‐related challenges. Governments have identified the need to redefine health and social care services to address the evolving needs of both patients and service providers. Yet, there is a struggle to balance the interrelatedness of the social and technical aspects of sector‐wide change initiatives, and little is known about the dynamics of the technology‐push and demand‐pull nexus when scaling effective healthcare initiatives beyond the incremental pilot phase, to national levels. This paper addresses this knowledge deficit by drawing on insights gained through the formation and launch of the Health and Social Care Innovation Wales ecosystem. It introduces an innovation impact matrix to support public policy advisors and innovation strategists in understanding how interactions between economic value and healthcare value can impact the ecosystem. The paper provides policy makers, innovation leads, and health and social care managers with a set of recommendations to mitigate the strategic and operational challenges of orchestrating and scaling a digital health innovation ecosystem.