Search results

In the present era, digital technology can be used responsibly to provide developed and developing countries with high-quality health-care services to nations. This study aims to explore Saudi Arabia’s intentions to adopt digital health-care practices.

To be consistent with previous studies, this study used a quantitative methodology to collect the data from health-care professionals working in Saudi Arabia’s public and private health institutes. Consequently, this study’s findings are based on 306 valid samples.

On the one hand, the path analysis reveals that health-care professionals believe in perceptions relating to the use of e-health and technology (PEHT) and experiences regarding internet use (ERIU) and that these have positive and significant effects on attitudes toward the use of e-health and technology (ATEHT) and intentions to use e-health services (ITUES). On the other hand, barriers to using e-health (BUEH) negatively impact ATEHT and ITUES. Finally, ATEHT also has a positive and significant effect on ITUES.

This study’s findings will help Saudi Arabia’s policymakers and the country’s health ministry to develop policies to provide e-services that health-care professionals can use to improve the quality of the country’s health care, patients’ human rights and social care. Furthermore, this study’s findings are helpful in developing attitudes and intentions toward either e-health or digital health to provide better health facilities to serve Saudi Arabia’s citizens.

This study empirically confirms among Saudi Arabia’s health-care professionals the PEHT, ERIU and BUEH toward ATEHT and ITUES.

Economists have recognized knowledge management as a promising tool regarding all aspects of the economy, including health care. The volume of biomedical literature is currently growing at an exponential rate, and the vast number of studies makes it extremely difficult for researchers to keep up with new developments in their research areas. Therefore, the efficient management of huge amounts of data and the accuracy of the knowledge thus obtained are vital concerns. Electronic health (e-health) has emerged as a useful concept to provide data for solo self-care management. Although health care is a common topic on the internet, patients rarely share their health care-related knowledge on social media. This study aims to examine the impact of knowledge on e-health.

This paper complies with the methodological requirements of systematic literature reviews. The present paper has investigated the newest systems and studied their practical techniques in detail. The effects of knowledge on e-health have been categorized into major groups.

The outcomes indicate that the capabilities of information and communication technology certainly promote the exchange of knowledge within clinics. The results also show that institutional architectures have significant impacts on knowledge-sharing exercises, significantly improving patient safety.

These findings will be essential in the understanding of the interplay among various signals in theory and in the understanding of patients’ choice in the e-health community in practice. The results have implications for existing health management and e-health literature. The present paper will help policymakers, health-care executives and project managers to effectively set their operations and make them maintainable, prevent unpredicted obstacles and better allocate their resources. Overall, the results of this paper will guide researchers who are working in the field of e-health.

E-health attempts have mostly focused on answering questions using context-specific technical answers, regardless of the key role of knowledge resources. The present paper has provided an innovative viewpoint on how knowledge resources and knowledge-sharing initiatives may have a role in the innovative work behaviors shown by health-care employees. As noted before, there have been only a few studies regarding the effects of knowledge on health care, so the present paper contributes to the previous literature, particularly about e-health.

Technology has revolutionized the delivery of health-care services, with e-consultations becoming popular mode of service delivery, especially during the pandemic. Extant research has examined the adoption of e-health consultation services, with little attention paid to examine the switching behavior. This study aims to identify factors affecting patients’ intentions to switch from conventional mode i.e. visiting hospitals/clinics to e-health consultations.

To understand this we use the push–pull–mooring (PPM) framework and integrate variables from status quo bias framework to the model. A cross-section research design was used, which rendered 413 valid responses which were obtained from the patients visiting a traditional hospital setup. The data was analyzed using partial least square – structural equation modeling using SmartPLS 3.0.

Findings suggest that push effects (inconvenience and perceived risk), pull effects (opportunity for alternatives and ubiquitous care), mooring effects (trust) and inertia significantly influence patients’ switching intentions from visiting hospitals/clinics to e-health consultations. Further, habit and switching cost positively influence inertia.

This study shall enable online health-care service providers and practitioners to understand patients’ intentions to switch to online health platforms and accordingly develop related marketing strategies, services and policies to encourage them to switch to the new offerings.

The current study enriches the previous research on e-health services by applying and extending PPM framework as the base model and showing its efficiency in predicting individuals switching intentions in the context of emerging economies. This study bridges the gap by focusing on switching behavior in context of health services.

The overall purpose of this empirically validated research paper is to determine factors that impact the success of using social media channels by consumers for salvaging health-care information by integrating constructs of the information system (IS) success model, e-health service quality and perceived usefulness during pre- and post-COVID settings.

Online survey responses of 243 consumers for study 1 and 184 consumers for study 2 were validated using factor analysis to understand consumers’ attitudes toward social media use. Constructs from existing literature and theories have been extracted to develop the proposed model, which has been empirically validated through statistical tests. A paired-samples t-test was also conducted to compare the customer satisfaction mean of pre- and post-COVID conditions; and word of mouth (WOM) for pre- and post-COVID conditions.

The outcome of this study supports that service quality and information quality conclusively influence customer satisfaction of consumers for health-care information among respondents pre COVID, and service quality, perceived usefulness and information quality conclusively affect customer satisfaction of consumers for health-care information among respondents post COVID. Furthermore, the e-health service quality contributes noteworthy in shaping the consumers’ satisfaction with social media usage for study 2 and information quality for study 1. A paired-samples t-test revealed that the two groups behaved significantly differently for customer satisfaction and WOM in the two groups.

At prima facie, this study has a geographical limitation for the sample size. The respondents for the online research were from the urban suburb of Bengaluru, India. The data collection has not focused on any precise social media channel.

Identification and comprehension of constructs that influence consumer satisfaction related to social media usage for health-care information can assist health-care managers in developing appropriate strategies for consumers to maximize social media usage. Moreover, this study provides an insight into the consumer’s perception of using social media channels for seeking health-care information.

This study recommends an empirically validated model for the success of social media in a consumer setting for the health-care scenario. This research is a unique attempt that inspects social media satisfaction by adapting constructs from existing theories of the IS success model, e-health service quality and perceived usefulness.

Evaluating primary care for children has not before been undertaken on a national level, and only infrequently on an international level, an adult-focused perspective is the norm. The Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) project explored the evaluation of quality of primary care for children in a nationally comparable way, which recognises the influence of all components of child well-being and well-becoming. Using adult-focused metrics fails to account for children’s physical and psycho-social development at different ages, differences in health and non-health determinants, patterns of disease and risk factors and the stages of the life course. To do this, we attempted to identify comparable measures of child health in the European Union and European Economic Area countries, we aimed to perform a structural equation modelling technique to identify causal effects of certain policies or procedures in children’s primary care and we aimed to identify and interrogate large datasets for key tracer conditions. We found that the creation of comparative data for children and child health services remains a low priority in Europe, and the largely unmet need for indicators covering all the healthcare dimensions hampers development of evidence-based policy. In terms of the MOCHA project objective of appraising models of child primary health care, the results of this specific work show that the means of appraisal of system and service quality are not yet agreed or mature, as well as having inadequate data to fuel them.

This paper aims to discuss the strategic role of telehealth technologies in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is a viewpoint paper, based on opportune information published and discussed by scholars and managers from different sources; the authors gathered this information to discuss the implications of telehealth during the outbreak.

Based on examples and benchmarking, the authors found that it is possible to lean on telehealth technologies as a frontline ally to avoid the spread of the virus by tracking, testing and treating (3T’s model).

Together with information published on COVID-19, the authors present their critical observations on the use of telehealth. However, the authors acknowledge that there are restrictions on the use of new technologies in health-care practices that were not addressed by this paper, and they suggest further research to address this limitation.

Governments, health-care organizations and managers are encouraged to take advantage of the information published in this paper. One of the benefits of telehealth is the possibility of bringing patients and physicians together virtually, without the need for physical contact. Henceforth, the authors suggest a more comprehensive implementation of best practices from telehealth to relieve congested health-care facilities and to avoid the risk of further infection.

The economic and social impacts of the virus are considered unprecedented by governments worldwide. Therefore, the authors advocate that telehealth practices embedded in health-care practices relieve the pressure that naturally arise during this type of critical event.

In this timely paper, the authors provide invaluable information related to the impact of telehealth technologies on flattening the infection curve of COVID-19.

This paper aims to present a non-linear mathematical model-based routing protocol for wireless body area networks (WBANs). Two non-linear mathematical models for WBANs are used in the proposed protocols Model 1 and Model 2. Model 1 intends to improve the data transmission rate and Model 2 intends to reduce energy consumption in the WBANs. These models are simulated for fixed deployment and priority-based data transmission, and performance of the network is analyzed under four constraints on WBANs.

Advancements in wireless technology play a vital role in several applications such as electronic health care, entertainment and games. Though WBANs are widely used in digital health care, they have restricted battery capacity which affects network stability and data transmission. Therefore, several research studies focused on reducing energy consumption and maximizing the data transmission rate in WBANs.

Simulation results of the proposed protocol exhibit superior performance in terms of four network constraints such as residual energy, the stability of the network, path loss and data transmission rate in contrast with conventional routing protocols. The performance improvement of these parameters confirms that the proposed algorithm is more reliable and consumes less energy than traditional algorithms.

The Model 1 of the proposed work provides maximum data extraction, which ensures reliable data transmission in WBANs. The Model 2 allocates minimal hop count path between the sink and the sensor nodes, which minimizes energy consumption in the WBANs.

Health care systems are evaluated by the triad of access, quality, and cost. This article presents evidence-based outcomes of multiple measures of concern with the United States (U.S.) health care system and proposes a universal health care system as the solution of choice. One third of the U.S. population is either non-insured or underinsured. Lack of quality care is shown by several indicators. Cost concerns are noted in cross-national studies which emphasize that the U.S. spends twice as much for health care but with less access for its citizens to health care. The presidential election of Fall 2004 provides a “window of opportunity” for this policy to be enacted.

The objective of this paper is to analyse the simultaneous effect of intention, attitude, knowledge, injunctive norm, descriptive norm, facility access, perceived Internet health information, hedonic motivation, utilitarian motivation, and perceived threat of non-communicable diseases (NCD) on Internet usage for health purposes.

The empirical data were collected through a survey. The respondents of the survey are 369 Jakarta residents. Multiple regression analysis was conducted.

Internet usage for health purposes is significantly affected by intention, knowledge, descriptive norm, and the perceived threat of NCD. Internet usage for health purposes is not influenced by attitude, facility access, perceived Internet health information, hedonic and utilitarian motivation.

This research was conducted only in Jakarta. It also employed a purposive sampling technique. Future research should be conducted in other locations and used a probability sampling technique.

To improve the level of Internet usage for health purposes, it is essential to increase the public’s intention to use the Internet for health purposes, their knowledge on Internet usage for health purposes, and their awareness of the dangers of NCD. It is also important to persuade the community influential leaders/persons to use the Internet for health purposes.

This study is the first to develop and test an Internet usage for health purposes model that involves intention, attitude, knowledge, injunctive norm, descriptive norm, facility access, perceived Internet health information, hedonic motivation, utilitarian motivation, and perceived threat of NCD.