Challenges to E-healthcare adoption in developing countries: A case study of Tanzania

Abstract

The use of ICT in healthcare, which resulted into e-healthcare, has many benefits to both individuals and governments. These benefits include reduction in medical errors, improvements in physician efficiency and an increase in the quality of care delivered. Unfortunately, there are many challenges associated with electronic healthcare adoption. In this paper we investigate the challenges associated with electronic healthcare adoption in Tanzania, and propose solutions to them. The proposed solutions will help the Tanzanian government in its design and implementation of electronic healthcare projects.

Determining the Feasibility of Adopting Technological Innovation to Enhance Service Delivery in Selected Johannesburg Health Institutions

“…Therefore it can be concluded that security ultimately affects system usage of the new technological innovation which can be a CRM or use of cloud services to store information on a virtual drive for future reference of patient files. The findings from the study also support by a similar study done by (Omary, et al, 2010) who also discovered that adoption of technological equipment by health institutions in developing countries is greatly affected by the security concerns of stakeholders involved.…”

Architectural frameworks for developing national health information systems in low and middle income countries

“…This is especially frustrating at the local level where data collection is still a significant burden [3,30]. The significant progress made by HICs in developing their NHIS is partly due to huge financial investments [31]. Countries like Canada, Australia, the UK and USA have spent between 2.6 and 38 billion USD on their individual NHIS programs [32][33][34].…”

“…Specialized technical ICT and managerial skills [3,36], adequately skilled healthcare workforce [31] and computer literacy is limited and made worse by a brain drain especially in rural areas [40]. Keeping qualified HIS specialists with the low salary schemes at the Ministry of Public Health remains a challenge [25].…”

“…The limited health information systems infrastructure is unevenly distributed between rural and urban areas [4] [41], with a large proportion of the LMIC population living in remote areas that are disconnected [31]. This poses a particular challenge when developing HIS for uniform implementation in a country [10] and is one of the reasons that the many 'pilot projects' [42] do not provide sustainable largescale benefits [29].…”

Hopes and Fears in Implementation of Electronic Health Records in Bangladesh

“…The results from our study did not stress confidentiality and privacy related issues as important, perhaps as the adoption of EHR systems in the two hospitals was very limited. But in Tanzania confidentiality, privacy and security concerns were reported which shows that ICTs are vulnerable to security, privacy, technological dependence issues, and technology ultimately has problems too and it will probably continue to be so (Omary, Lupiana, Mtenzi, & Wu, 2009). Therefore, some caution is needed while implementing EHR systems.…”