Healthcare is undergoing a digital transformation as advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and connected devices revolutionize clinical decision-making, care delivery, and patient outcomes. Digital technologies, particularly AI, have created unprecedented opportunities to enhance healthcare delivery, but their adoption remains notably slower compared to other industries. This adoption gap stems from various complexities, particularly in how healthcare professionals evaluate and integrate new technologies into their practice, and how medical technology (MedTech) firms support this integration process. Previous research has largely overlooked this complexity, particularly the interplay between healthcare professionals’ adoption decisions and MedTech firms’ capabilities. The purpose of this presentation is to show how healthcare professionals adopt digital technologies and how MedTech firms’ capabilities can facilitate digitalization and value creation in healthcare.   

The findings indicate that successful healthcare digitalization emerges through structured interactions between healthcare professionals and MedTech firms. Healthcare professionals evaluate technologies through multiple value dimensions – cost-sacrifice, instrumental, hedonic, and symbolic – which shape their adoption attitudes. Importantly, these professionals encounter significant implementation tensions related to learning requirements, performance expectations, professional identity, and shifting power dynamics. Successfully navigating these tensions requires developing a paradoxical mindset that enables professionals to embrace contradictory demands while reducing resistance to technological change. Concurrently, MedTech firms must leverage external complementary capabilities to develop technologies that create meaningful value for healthcare professionals. Their role extends beyond technology development to active participation in the adoption process within healthcare providers. This involvement includes ensuring technological interoperability, co-developing implementation blueprints, interpreting legal and ethical frameworks, and reducing uncertainties about technology operationalization, particularly in the collection and analysis of patient-related data. The synergy between healthcare professionals and MedTech firms creates a foundation for healthcare digitalization that ensures technologies not only meet clinical needs but also generate sustainable value in practice.