Building the path for healthcare digitalization through a possible depiction of telehealth evolution

The chapter aims to focus the attention on the telehealth as challenging domain based on “the use of ICTs to exchange health information and provide healthcare services across geographic, time, social, cultural, and political barriers line” (Scott and Mars, 2015). The primary purpose of the chapter is to describe the main features of telehealth in the articulated domain of healthcare digitalization as a way for tracing possible guidelines for supporting both researchers and practitioners in better shifting from an “instrumental approach” to digital devices in the healthcare sector to a “digital view” of healthcare systems. In such a vein, the rest of the text, after a brief description of the theoretical background on which reflections herein are based (Section 2), will adopt the interpretative lens provided by the research streams interested in Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989) for depicting a conceptual model able to explain the technology adoption lifecycle (Bohlen and Beal, 1957) with reference to the telehealth (Section 3). Finally, the main implications of reflections herein will be discussed, and final remarks and future directions for the research will be traced (Section 4).