Distinguishing “mHealth” from Other Healthcare Services in a Developing Country: A Study from the Service Quality Perspective

Abstract

Mobile phones' exponential growth is fuelling the emergence of mobile health (mHealth), thus contributing to healthcare services' innovative transformation in developing countries. mHealth's ubiquitous personalised capabilities obviate the access barriers and dismal performance of conventional systems, therefore gaining popularity among patients. Researchers have focused on service quality-a vital element of service adoption-and sustainability. For mHealth to become a robust alternative, how patients perceive mHealth vis-à-vis conventional services must be understood. Comparative analysis studies between mHealth and conventional systems are scarce yet would contribute to theory and strengthen the antecedent phases to service quality, that is, design and operation. mHealth is a viable alternative for fulfiling the unmet goal of quality of life for all. Prompted by these insights, this study is the first attempt to discover the differentiating characteristics of mHealth. Patients' perceptions were analyzed by multiple discriminant analysis, a classification technique. The findings show that, in distinguishing between healthcare services, mHealth is a favourable alternative: service differentiation occurs along the dimensions of ubiquity, information-quality, and value. The findings' implications for theory and practice and future research guidelines are also discussed.

The Antecedents of Poor Doctor-Patient Relationship in Mobile Consultation: A Perspective from Computer-Mediated Communication

“…Both informational-oriented and emotional-oriented communication are twoway communications between doctors and users. When the medical environment shifts from the traditional face-to-face context to the mobile context, the features of the medium that supports doctor-patient communication have also changed [18,42,43]. While traditional face-to-face medical communication relies on synchronous communication with language tones and facial or body cues, mobile communication relies on textbased asynchronous communication [18].…”

A Proposed Framework of Factors Affecting Patient Adoption of mHealth in the Developing World.

“…Research methods used in the 54 reviewed resources were 25 qualitative papers [6,21,22,48,60,37,31,29,43,82,85,87,38,51,14,44,53,54,49,10,32,33,46,34,84], 9 surveys [7,8,45,4,16,13,23,28,18], mixed methods 7 [9,27,47,86,88,89,90], experimental 4 [19,26,36,91], 3 usability assessments [92,15,5], 2 cohort studies [11,41], and 4 were cross sectional [17,<...>…”

“…Some issues were related to cost, affordability, and incentives. When the operating costs are not affordable [5][6][7][8][9][10]91], and patients must buy airtime (i.e., where the patient pays for the calls or messages he/she receives or makes in accessing m-healthcare from the service provider [11]), mhealth is likely to fail, unless the patient is able or willing to pay [13,14]. Patients may accept the 6 technology if the cost of owning and operating it is considered acceptable [13,43].…”

Consumer Co-creation of Value in mHealth (Mobile Health) Service

“…Highlighting the challenges of the health care sector and the changing role of the patients, the research proposes a model to conceptualize CCV in the context of individuals. Being a transformative service for the unserved population (Ivatury et al, 2009;Motamarri et al, 2014), mHealth serves as a valuable platform to study CCV from the individual's perspective.…”