Distinguishing mHealth from other health care alternatives in developing countries: a study on service characteristics

Abstract

Services in general and healthcare services in particular require proper planning and design so as to address patients concerns and improve outcomes. In this context, mobile phone s wide spread penetration coupled with its versatility is transforming it as a significant delivery channel for healthcare services. Mobile Health (mHealth- healthcare using mobile phones) is expected to enhance the access to healthcare especially, in the developing world. Following the House of Quality (HoQ) for service design, the literature search identified significant gaps in comparatively assessing mHealth with the other conventional services. Such an analysis is important for the large scale adoption of mHealth.

To fill this gap, the current research has carried out a quantitative comparison of healthcare services, an important element of HoQ. The study explores the broad research questions: whether service alternatives are distinguishable from each other and if so, what factors contribute to the differentiation. A multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is performed to understand patients perceptions of various healthcare services: public hospital (PH), general practitioner (GP), traditional medicine (TM) and B2C mHealth service in a developing country.

Ubiquity, interaction quality and value have been identified to have significant influence on the patients attitude towards health care services. mHealth is perceived by the patients as far more easy to use, useful and valuable than other service alternatives. These insights are incorporated into the HoQ model for healthcare service design. mHealth is found to be an effective alternative to serve the developing world where populations are marginally deprived of even basic healthcare services. Theoretical and practical relevance of these findings are analysed and some directions are provided for future research.