Intensifying Innovation Adoption in Educational eHealth

In demanding innovation areas such as eHealth, the primary emphasis is easily placed on the product and process quality aspects in the design phase. Customer quality may receive adequate attention when the target audience is well-defined. But if the multidimensional evaluative focus does not get enough space until the implementation phase, this means a delay. The study examines how the adoption and diffusion processes of educational eHealth innovations could be enhanced from the viewpoint of design. Explorative, critical analysis of the multidisciplinary literature with a pragmatic approach serves this aim. The prerequisites identified in general adoption models and theories refer to several quality aspects. When designers understand the meaning of versatile quality framing in the early design phase, this may ease the adoption processes of eHealth. Questioning that focuses on the quality of eHealth innovations rather than on adaptation problems is more fruitful from the viewpoint of design. In demanding development areas, the maturation processes of products may be laborious, and therefore, rapid diffusion processes are not always possible and not even useful if these occur at the expense of quality.