What is the role of ICTs in addressing health outcomes and limitations from socio-economic status?

While access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been touted as a key determinant for human development, few studies have investigated how ICT implementations assist people with low socioeconomic status (SES) and the impacts this might have on health outcomes. This paper investigates the relation between having access to ICTs, health outcomes, and SES. The association between socioeconomic affluence and health is even recognized by policymakers, which suggests that there is an association between SES status and health. This paper addresses the gap in the literature by investigating the research questions: 1) what is the relation between access to ICTs and fair or poor health? 2) Is there a relation between access to ICTs and socio-economic status? The findings illustrate that having less access to ICTs is related to individuals more frequently reporting fair or poor health and having less access to ICTs relates to low SES communities that are in poverty, have lower education rates, have a high number of uninsured people, have people who experience more physical distress, and live in rural areas. A key contribution is that access to ICTs does have a correlation to health and that access to ICTs have a relation to low SES. This means that ICTs can help people access resources to assist with poverty, insurance, education, physical distress, and people who live in rural populations can take advantage of ICTs to help them lead the lives they choose to live

Implementation Science for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

This book focuses on the application of implementation science methods to enable the rapid uptake and sustainable implementation of new diagnostics into routine health practices to strengthen health systems.Diagnostics are essential for the success of universal health coverage and improved health outcomes. The increased development and deployment of diagnostics for use at the point of care will not guarantee improved access to diagnostics and health outcomes if their implementation is not optimized. Optimal implementation will need to be guided by theories and methods that aim to promote evidence-based practices and findings of research into routine practice, taking into consideration quality systems and contexts

Mental Health, Chronic Disease, and Substance Use: Findings From Rural Texas

There are vital links among mental health conditions, chronic diseases, and substance use disorders. Simultaneous examination of the relationship among these three conditions is essential for providing well-integrated care to rural residents who have limited resources and for representing medically underserved areas. We aimed to assess the burden of behavioral health conditions and chronic diseases from a rural Texas community to garner context-specific insights and inform effective health promotion strategies in similar communities. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 181 residents from various zip codes in a rural Texas county. A self-administered, 18-item health-needs questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants. Of the total participants, 30.0% reported mental health conditions, 16.0% reported substance use disorders, and 44.2% reported having at least one type of chronic disease. Overall, mental health conditions were associated with substance use disorders [OR: 1.58 (95% CI: 0.73–2.42)] and chronic disease [OR: 1.07 (95% CI: 0.39–1.75)], but no associations were observed between substance use and chronic disease [OR: 0.62 (95% CI: -0.20–1.43)]. The economic and accessibility barriers that rural residents commonly face call attention to the need for integrated care that combines primary care and behavioral health services

The social implications of technology diffusion : uncovering the unintended consequences of people’s health-related mobile phone use in rural India and China

After three decades of mobile phone diffusion, thousands of mobile-phone-based health projects worldwide (“mHealth”), and hundreds of thousands of smartphone health applications, fundamental questions about the effect of phone diffusion on people’s healthcare behavior continue to remain unanswered. This study investigated whether, in the absence of specific mHealth interventions, people make different healthcare decisions if they use mobile phones during an illness. Following mainstream narratives, we hypothesized that phone use during an illness (a) increases and (b) accelerates healthcare access. Our study was based on original survey data from 800 respondents in rural Rajasthan (India) and Gansu (China), sampled from the general adult population in 2014 in a three-stage stratified cluster random sampling design. We analyzed single- and multi-level logistic, Poisson, and negative binomial regression models with cluster-robust standard errors. Contrary to other research at the intersection of mobile phones and healthcare, we captured actual health-related mobile phone use during people’s illnesses irrespective of whether they own a phone. Our analysis produced the first quantitative micro-evidence that patients’ personal mobile phone use is correlated with their healthcare decisions. Despite a positive association between phone use and healthcare access, health-related phone use was also linked to delayed access to public doctors and nurses. We considered theoretical explanations for the observed patterns by augmenting transaction cost and information deficit arguments with the prevailing health system configuration and with notions of heuristic decision-making during the healthcare-seeking process. Our study was a first step toward understanding the implications of mobile technology diffusion on health behavior in low- and middle-income countries in the absence of specific mHealth interventions. Future research will have to explore the causal relationships underlying these statistical associations. Such a link could potentially mean that development interventions aimed at improving access to healthcare continue to require conventional solutions to sustain healthcare equity