Abstract
The integration of drones into health care as a supplement to existing logistics methods may generate a need for cooperation and involvement across multiple resource areas. It is currently not well understood whether such integrations would merely represent a technical implementation or if they would cause more significant changes to laboratory services. By choosing socio-technical theory as the theoretical lens, this paper intends to harvest knowledge from the literature on various organizational concepts and examine possible synergies between such theories to determine optimal strategies for introducing the use of drones in a health care context. Our particular interest is to examine whether the insights generated from the multi-level perspective (MLP) may have the potential to create dynamic spin-offs related to the organizational transitions associated with the implementation of drones in health services. We built our study on a scoping literature review of topics associated with the MLP and socio-technical studies from differing arenas, supplemented with studies harvested on a broader basis. The scoping review is based on 25 articles that were selected for analysis. As a way of organizing the literature, the niche, regime, and landscape levels of the MLP are translated to the corresponding health care-related terms, i.e., clinic, institution, and health care system. Furthermore, subcategories emerged inductively during the process of analysis. The MLP provides essential knowledge regarding the context for innovation and how the interaction between the different levels can accelerate the diffusion of innovations. Several authors have put both ethical topics and public acceptance into a socio-technological perspective. Although a socio-technical approach is not needed to operate drones, it may help in the long run to invest in a culture that is open to innovation and change.
Highlights
As health care costs surge and the need for resources seems to exceed any realistic prospect of supplying them, new technological solutions are being pursued to save costs and reduce the need for specialized resources [1,2,3,4,5]
We examine whether the principles of the multi-level perspective (MLP) regarding system innovations as merging transitions from one socio-technical system to another may offer a framework that can be helpful for understanding system innovations related to drones in health care [33,39,40,41,42]
The large diversity of opinions in the public perception of drones is illustrated by the distance between a report by Truog et al [67] from Malawi, which described how community leaders were afraid that autonomous drones could be perceived as something unnatural and possessed, and our own research at Oslo University Hospital, where we have found that the use of drones in health care is seen positively across professional groups, ages, and locations [83]
Summary
As health care costs surge and the need for resources seems to exceed any realistic prospect of supplying them, new technological solutions are being pursued to save costs and reduce the need for specialized resources [1,2,3,4,5]. Drones may be relevant as supplements to existing logistics methods, where they can be integrated into existing ground transport systems as an extension to provide last-mile or on-demand services to meet time-critical demands [18,19,20,21]. Such integrations may generate a need for cooperation and involvement across multiple resource areas, i.e., across medical, logistical, and transport workforces. How such processes should best be developed and implemented has not yet been studied extensively
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