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The significance of physician-user interaction has been widely acknowledged in offline and online healthcare consultation. However, limited attempts have been made to explore the influence of physician-user interaction on users' perceived service quality (PSQ) in the mobile context. Based on the literature on physician-user interaction and media synchronicity theory, this study proposes a theoretical model where the interactive factors common across the offline, online and mobile context, i.e. physicians' informational support and emotional support, the interactive factors unique in the mobile context, i.e. physicians' response speed and voice service, and the interaction between the two categories of interactive factors predict users' PSQ in mobile consultation.

This study collects consultation records between 25,225 users and 738 physicians from a leading Chinese mobile consultation application, and employs linear regression to verify the proposed theoretical model.

Physicians' informational, emotional support, response speed and voice service are found to have significant positive impacts on users' PSQ. Besides, physicians' response speed strengthens the positive impacts of physicians' informational and emotional support on users' PSQ, while physicians' voice service weakens the positive link between physicians' informational support on users' PSQ.

This study contributes to the antecedents for users' PSQ in mobile consultation by identifying unique interactive factors in the mobile context, and highlighting the individual and interaction effects of different physician-user interactive factors. Besides, this study employs novel methods, which leverages text classification and text pattern recognition to more accurately depict physicians' online behaviors based on objective communication records.

This study aims to investigate the external and internal stimuli, which affect the organismic experiences of the users and thereby influence their response in terms of behavioral intention toward the use of online doctor consultation platforms.

The study operationalized the stimulus–organism–response framework for the research model and surveyed 357 users in India who had experienced online doctor consultation platforms. The analysis has been done using the structural equation modeling approach.

The authors’ main results indicate the following key points. One, perceived usefulness, social influence, health anxiety, offline consultation habit and perceived technology usage risk are significant predictors of perceived value. In contrast, perceived ubiquity is identified to be an insignificant predictor of perceived value. Second, social influence and perceived technology usage risk have significant influence on trust. However, perceived usefulness is not a significant predictor of trust.

This study contributes to the theory by integrating technology-oriented factors with behavioral attributes for determining the behavioral intention of users toward the online doctor consultation platforms.

The managerial contributions of this study involve highlighting those technology-oriented and behavioral elements, which can be targeted to attract more users toward these platforms.

This is an original study that has looked beyond the role of technology-oriented factors in influencing the perceived value and trust elements while investigating the behavioral intention among the users toward the online doctor consultation platforms.

The mobile medical consultation (MMC) service is growing rapidly, but not all consumers are always willing to actively engage with it. To address this issue, based on IT identity theory, this study explores the underlying mechanism of how two types of platform-related consumer experience influence MMC platform identity, in turn, result in consumer negatively-valenced engagement in MMC.

The data was collected from 400 consumers with the experience of MMC and analyzed by the partial least square (PLS) method.

The findings unfold that these two distinct consumer experience, servicescape experience (i.e. perceived telepresence and perceived platform surveillance) and service search experience (i.e. perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity), are associated with MMC platform identity and consumer negatively valenced engagement with MMC.

Research on consumer negatively-valenced engagement in the field of MMC is still in a nascent stage. The study identifies consumer experience in accordance with the unique context of the MMC platform and fills the research gap on the role of IT identity in consumer negatively valenced engagement.

Background to the European Commission consultation on the electronic money directive (2000/46/EC) with particular reference to the definition of ‘electronic money’, the impact on mobile telephone operators, different structures for payment of goods and services under schemes for the issue of prepaid electronic value, the regulatory requirements on banks and e‐money institutions and the application of anti‐money laundering requirements.

This research paper explores alternatives to the mobile library service in providing a public library service to rural communities in England and the impacts of best value, public library standards and social inclusion policy on provision. A questionnaire survey was completed by librarians in public library authorities in England with rural hinterlands. The data derived were supplemented by follow‐up case studies. It was found that achieving social inclusion objectives and the results of best value reviews were the greatest motivating factors for much of the development of alternative library service delivery in rural areas, and that village halls were the most popular place for co‐location of library services. ICT was felt to have impacted positively on rural library service delivery and its use was demonstrated in co‐location facilities and learning centres. However, some authorities fail to consult users and non‐users in rural locations. This paper provides public library practitioners and researchers with a picture of public library service provision to rural area communities and shows the impact of Government‐driven policy. It appears that there is varying appreciation by public library authorities of rural communities’ distinct nature.

The purpose of the paper is to identify global best practice in the regulation of quality of service on cellular wireless networks.

The paper presents an identification of issues from the literature and an analysis of examples of activities of regulators around the world.

The paper finds that there is a wide range of approaches that are not easily comparable and do not necessarily fit with policy goals.

Mostly, the surveys are of basic voice parameters, with little on data or value services.

The paper calls for better understanding of the information gaps of consumers and how third parties, including regulators, can play a part, in particular in the move toward 3G and 3.5G.

The paper reviews a very wide range of materials and presents in a framework that helps understand the information gaps of consumers and how third parties, including regulators, can play a part, in particular in the move toward 3G and 3.5G.

This study aims to analyze the effects of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions on the behavioral intention of using mobile health applications, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A survey was developed using an online survey platform and distributed to Indonesian consumers for three weeks, and 149 usable responses were obtained. The principal component analysis, linear regression and analysis of variance tests were performed to test the validity and reliability of the measurement model and the hypothesized relationships among constructs.

Surprisingly, unlike previous studies on IT adoption, the findings show that social influence has no significant impact on behavioral intention. Facilitating conditions have a very weak to almost no significant impact on behavioral intention to use mobile health applications.

This research is conducted during pandemic COVID-19 where using mobile health apps is a must. In the future this research can be expanded as comparison study after the pandemic COVID-19 stated.

The result implies that digital technologies adoption intention is strongly affected by performance expectancy and effort expectancy, with performance expectancy as the most significant predictor. Nonetheless, the interaction of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions influences behavioral intention significantly. Therefore, social influence and facilitating conditions are still important even with very insignificant effects.

To improve consumers’ behavioral intention to use mobile health applications, application providers should promote mobile health applications as useful telemedicine tools by primarily focusing on the application performance and usage experience.

Humanized digital solutions that provide better access, understanding and use of health services enable better decisions and better patient’s experience focused on humanization of care. This translates into better health literacy in the digital area.

Currently health care is inseparable from digital health, and this evidence was highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this analysis, a cross-sectional study was carried out, with 335 valid answers in a quantitative and qualitative research to evaluate the opinion of the respondents regarding their digital health use and the means used, as well as the perception of emotions generated before and during the pandemic. A qualitative content analysis was also performed on the open question about the future of health.

The results showed a humanization in digital is essential and that it is necessary to prioritize the human relationship and find the meaning of space, communication and proximity of health face-to-face, respecting as differences.

This chapter will also propose the presentation of challenges and results from the application of health literacy on patient empowerment in the health system, based on humanized digital solutions.

Information communication technologies can serve as a crucial missing link toward tacking wicked problems of social welfare policy implementation through collaborative governance. Using a mixed methods approach, a pre- and postanalyses were used to investigate whether and how cell phones can increase awareness of pregnant women about different cash and service benefits of maternal health benefit policies of 82 pregnant women in a remote tribal community in Melghat forest of Maharashtra, India. Pregnant women received customized prerecorded bilingual audio calls on their mobile phones about maternal health benefit policies. The author then traced whether those audio messages increased the claiming of policy benefits and public engagement. The key contribution of this research is that contrary to the optimism about digital governance, findings suggest that cell phones are not a “silver bullet” for increasing receipt of maternal health benefits. This book chapter concludes with the prescription that the impact of mobile phones and other information technologies will be marginal as long as there are administrative deficiencies in policy implementation and a misalignment in state and federal policy designs.

This study aims to introduce a new mode of mobile library service, named “WeChat Library”, developed under the WeChat (social media platform) public service platform. The design and realization of WeChat Library is also presented with Chongqing University Library taken as the example.

This study designed a new mobile library service system, WeChat Library of Chongqing University Library, analyzed its construction cost and usage statistics and discussed the advantages of the new service mode.

Investigation results showed that 84.6 per cent of the “985” universities opened up WeChat Libraries, which signified that WeChat Library has become one of the important mobile service modes for Chinese university libraries. WeChat Library received high appreciation from the patrons; in 20 months of operation, 20.3 per cent of patrons in Chongqing University had used WeChat Library. The five most commonly used services are OPAC retrieval, items borrowed, personal center, resource discovery and announcements. WeChat Library was found to have many advantages, such as low development cost, automatic cross-platform service, adaptive screen, low acceptance cost, easier promotion, strong user viscosity, strong interactivity and real-time consulting.

The functional design and technological architecture of WeChat Library was presented with Chongqing University Library taken as the example. The technical realization of several unique services, namely, QR code access, space reservation and overdue reminders, was also demonstrated. The study will provide favorable suggestions and references for other libraries that have also launched the WeChat Library.

The mainstream service mode of mobile libraries is application for mobile terminals (APP). Although mobile services are applied extensively in China, numerous small- and medium-sized libraries are still unable to provide mobile services for patrons primarily because the investment is too high to bear for some libraries. Therefore, mobile library services urgently need a more economical model of mobile services. The most prominent advantages of WeChat Library are its low development cost and low technology threshold. WeChat Library can provide a better solution for mobile library services.