ICTs for inclusive communities in developing societies

Abstract Personal Health Records (PHRs) offer various advantages for individuals making use of these systems to document and maintain information related to their health. In addition, PHRs may play a positive role in preventative care and efforts to prevent and control non-communicable lifestyle diseases. Despite numerous benefits adoption rates are low, and little is known regarding the factors that affect adoption in the South African context. This exploratory paper highlights socio-technical factors that can affect the adoption of PHRs in the South African context. Socio-Technical Systems theory is applied as a theoretical lens to identify the social, technical, and environmental factors that can affect the adoption of PHRs. Factors that can positively contribute to, as well as negatively inhibit, the adoption of PHRs are identified

Factors Affecting the Behavioral Intention to Use Standalone Electronic Personal Health Record Applications by Adults in Egypt

Standalone electronic personal health record can be a useful tool that enables individuals to store, arrange and share their health information easily and they can build a history of their health timeline which is crucial for raising healthcare quality and better self-management, the adoption rate of these applications has been identified in several countries to be low and slowly progressing.Although there are some applications of standalone ePHR available in the market for usage free of charge but it’s almost not adopted at all, this study will investigate some of the factors that might affect the adoption of ePHR technology by adults in Egypt and provide business professionals a better picture for what can motivate or hinder the adoption process to achieve better adoption rates and eliminate the barriers.In order to ensure a comprehensive contextual analysis, researchers analyzed the research in hand with the perspective of the proposed contextual framework, the Nine Elements Framework/Model (Elsafty, 2018) that analyzes social studies research in general, and business/management reseaerches as well.Using the nine elements framework, the authors used it to discover the underlying factors that are causing the problems faced by the research in hand, and resulted in the coming contextual analysis defining the research scope and focus, which in the case of this paper is on Perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were adapted from TAM that was initially developed by Fred Davis (1989) and they proved to have a high predictive power of behavioral intention in CHI context, The extensions of TAM including UTAUT & UTAUT2 seems to be irrelevant to this research context since UTAUT is more oriented towards the organizational context (Venkatesh et al., 2012) and UTAUT2 added factors, Price value seems to be irrelevant in this research context as we are already studying platforms that are provided free of charge, Hedonic motivation maybe irrelevant to this context as healthcare related service is mostly associated with seriousness and urgency, also testing unimplemented platforms that are not yet adopted makes from the habit unrealistic experience that may be inaccurate to measure.Since other several researches recommended extending these factors with other additional factors to make it more relevant to the healthcare consumer context (Kim & Park, 2012), these factors may include health-related factors, technology-related factors and personal-related factors. Findings in this research revealed that adoption rate in Egypt is still very low and high demand for this service which makes this research is significant as it’s trying to find out the reasons behind this gap, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, (privacy and security), eHealth literacy, personalization and awareness had a significant impact on behavioral intention to use standalone ePHR applications. Personalization was found to have the strongest effect on behavioral intention followed by perceived usefulness. Health status was found to have an insignificant effect on behavioral intention which indicates the interest of people with different health statuses in standalone ePHR

Positive health: The passport approach to improving continuity of care for low income South African chronic disease sufferers

Research Problem: The South African health system faces numerous challenges associated with its status as a middle-income developing nation. Wasteful expenditure and poor clinical outcomes arise from inefficient inter-organizational communication of patient information and the lack of a centralized health database. Research question: How does the experience of chronic disease patients with their health information inform the development of future health records in low income population groups? Proposition: Exploration of patient and health care workers experiences of medical records can inform their future development to enhance continuity of care. Objectives, methodology, procedures and outcome: Identification of an appropriate format, technological basis and functional design of a prototype medical record system by means of a phenomenological study conducted through in-depth interviews of patients and doctors in order to improve clinical care. Left and right hermeneutics were used to analyse the data and develop themes. Findings: Health records play a critical role in the clinics workflow processes, document the patients' management and clinical progress. They are an important intermediary in the relationship between the patient and the facility. Inefficiencies in the paper-based system lead to ineffective consultations, loss of continuity of care and discord between practitioners and patients. Improvement of the records format is required to provide ubiquitous access to health and improve patient health literacy

Guidelines for secure cloud-based personal health records

Traditionally, health records have been stored in paper folders at the physician’s consulting rooms – or at the patient’s home. Some people stored the health records of their family members, so as to keep a running history of all the medical procedures they went through, and what medications they were given by different physicians at different stages of their lives. Technology has introduced better and safer ways of storing these records, namely, through the use of Personal Health Records (PHRs). With time, different types of PHRs have emerged, i.e. local, remote server-based, and hybrid PHRs. Web-based PHRs fall under the remote server-based PHRs; and recently, a new market in storing PHRs has emerged. Cloud computing has become a trend in storing PHRs in a more accessible and efficient manner. Despite its many benefits, cloud computing has many privacy and security concerns. As a result, the adoption rate of cloud services is not yet very high. A qualitative and exploratory research design approach was followed in this study, in order to reach the objective of proposing guidelines that could assist PHR providers in selecting a secure Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to store their customers’ health data. The research methods that were used include a literature review, systematic literature review, qualitative content analysis, reasoning, argumentation and elite interviews. A systematic literature review and qualitative content analysis were conducted to examine those risks in the cloud environment that could have a negative impact on the secure storing of PHRs. PHRs must satisfy certain dimensions, in order for them to be meaningful for use. While these were highlighted in the research, it also emerged that certain risks affect the PHR dimensions directly, thus threatening the meaningfulness and usability of cloud-based PHRs. The literature review revealed that specific control measures can be adopted to mitigate the identified risks. These control measures form part of the material used in this study to identify the guidelines for secure cloud-based PHRs. The guidelines were formulated through the use of reasoning and argumentation. After the guidelines were formulated, elite interviews were conducted, in order to validate and finalize the main research output: i.e. guidelines. The results of this study may alert PHR providers to the risks that exist in the cloud environment; so that they can make informed decisions when choosing a CSP for storing their customers’ health data