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While many e-health initiatives and projects were launched in the last couple of years, a large number of them failed or are prone to fail. These initiatives either missed to articulate a clear value proposition to patients or lacked a sustainable profit generation formula.

A core problem is the difficulty to understand and express the business logic behind e-health services in today's complex environment. Therefore, it is the aim of this study to provide appropriate means to analyze and explain business logics of e-health service provisions.

The study is of ethnographic nature, since business logics were studied in their social and cultural context. Furthermore, insights were gathered from a thematic literature review on business models in the healthcare sector.

Based on the “design pattern” concept applied in architecture and software engineering, three distinct examples of archetypical …