Digital Transformation and Ecosystem Orchestration in Global Travel Health Services : The case of Health4Travel

Abstract

The research aims to show how digital platform owners manage and guide a fragmented set of stakeholders within the world of cross-border healthcare. With digitalisation and the emergence of globally accessible services, there have been new ways to coordinate healthcare; these services produce a set of governance obligations. The coordination becomes difficult, especially when there are multiple independent players in the same ecosystem trying to coordinate together. The knowledge about platform governance comes from the most common world of e-commerce or tech innovations, leading to a gap in understanding how actors work in a red sea ecosystem like healthcare, where rules change the moment a service is delivered across the border. The current research touches these issues directly by understanding the mechanics of governance and ecosystem orchestration when regulations are not just meant to be met, but rather they are the primary force that allows, restricts, and defines all interactions. By combining platform governance literature, ecosystem orchestration and institutional theory, the research identifies the difficulties in the coordination of networks of clinics, third-party administrators, patients, travellers, and even insurance companies. The research follows a qualitative case study design, focusing on a company that is GDPR compliant digital platform coordinating outpatient travel healthcare across borders. The data for research were collected through semi-structured interviews with employees handling day-to-day operations. The research uses an abductive approach where the analysis moves back and forth between these practical cases and established theory to find the gap. The findings of this study contribute in three ways: platform governance in regulated environments by focusing on how institutional constraints try to shape coordination between mechanisms. Next, it elaborates ecosystem orchestration research by showing how orchestrators operate under multiple shared governance rather than a centralized unit control. Finally, it provides insights that are empirical for cross-border healthcare platforms, which remain underdeveloped in terms of research. The findings from this research offer both theoretical and practical insights for operators managing a huge, complex, multi-actor ecosystem.