An Examination of Failure Modes for Health-related Social Entreprenurial Ventures
Open Access
- Author:
- Callan, Jonathan Kramer
- Area of Honors:
- Elective Area of Honors - Engineering Design
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Khanjan Mehta, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Sven G Bilén, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- mHealth
global health
telemedicine
failure modes
community health workers
business models
social entrepreneurship - Abstract:
- Lack of access to quality, affordable health care is a major issue in the developing world. In order to mitigate this issue, some people and organizations are turning towards social entrepreneurial ventures, such as telemedicine and community health worker–centric ventures, to sustainably improve healthcare access in the developing world. Despite the strong financial, logistical, and clinical support from non-governmental organizations, government ministries, and private actors alike, the vast majority of these health-related social-entrepreneurial ventures fail to survive beyond the initial pilot phase and achieve their full potential. This thesis is broken into two sections to explore this phenomenon. In the first section, 35 entrepreneurial telemedicine and mobile health ventures, and 17 reports that analyze their operations and challenges, were reviewed. From this review recurring failure modes, or factors that lead to failure, of such venture pilots were synthesized. Real-world examples of successful and failed ventures are examined for key take-aways and practical strategies for creating successful commercial telemedicine and community health worker–centric businesses. In the second section, these failure modes were extrapolated and applied to various community health worker–centric business models to identify the most important failure modes for each of eight business models. A better understanding of these failure modes can inform the design of sustainable and scalable telemedicine and community health worker–centric ventures that successfully address the growing healthcare disparities in developing countries.