Abstract
Medical crowdfunding is the practice of using websites to raise money from donors to pay for medicalcare or related expenses. While in terms of overall funding volume, medical crowdfunding should still be considered as a niche phenomenon, it is rapidly growing in many countries and is seen by many people as a way to cope with government cuts on public health financing. Examining the worldwide population of healthcare crowdfunding platforms, this study is the first to offer global and cross-platform evidence on healthcare crowdfunding by providing an assessment of how and where healthcare crowdfunding platforms emerge. We explore the relationship between healthcare crowdfunding and national health systems, finding evidence of a substitution effect when public health coverage is low. Moreover, our findings support the evidence that the number of successfully funded health projects is higher when the platform is not investment-based or dedicated only to healthcare projects.
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Notes
See Cumming and Vismara (2017) for a discussion of new data sources for empirical studies in entrepreneurial finance.
The original list of 431 platforms included portals that are related to crowdfunding only in a broad sense. Our focus is instead on platforms that enables any investor to bid in campaigns. We therefore excluded 17 websites aimed at financing only one specific project or activities of a single organization, or portals that target only some type of investors, such as institutions (i.e., AngelIMD) or physicians (i.e., HealthFundr).
Some portals work in an all-or-nothing fashion, others keep-it-all. See Cumming et al. (2015) for a detailed analysis. We were not able to access to information on past campaigns for six platforms in our sample (i.e., Medifundo, Crowdfunding-Italia, IoDono, CureCancerStarter, Sound Affects, StartACure). We consider no successful campaigns for these platforms.
Note that this variable can be calculated only for platforms with at least one successfully funded project; in case of health platform, the variable takes the value of 1.
We were not able to retrieve information on the inception date for five platforms. The sample used for the multivariate analysis is therefore reduced to 71.
For robustness (unreported), we also run OLS regressions, without any appreciable change in the significance of independent and control variables.
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Bassani, G., Marinelli, N. & Vismara, S. Crowdfunding in healthcare. J Technol Transf 44, 1290–1310 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-018-9663-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-018-9663-7