Web 2.0 in Healthcare: The Rise of a Fashion Wave? Examining the Discourse in the Literature

Electronic Health (eHealth) increasingly refers to possibilities that arise from the so-called innovation “Web 2.0”. According to management fashion theory, many innovations can be classified as a fashion and only offer minor benefits for organizations. Such fashions have a diffusion and a discourse lifecycle. In this study we shed light on the discourse on Web 2.0 in healthcare. In order to explore how the discourse has emerged, we examine a selection of both the scholarly IS research and practitioner-oriented literature. Our findings show that there is almost no academic discourse on Web 2.0 in healthcare in the IS research literature. In contrast, we find an ongoing discourse on the subject with a wave-like shape in the domainspecific and practitioner-oriented literature. Our findings also provide some arguments for the debate on the link between scholarly IS literature and their practical relevance.