Framework on Mobile Technology Utilization for Assisted Healthcare Service Request and Delivery of Aged Person: A Case of Ghana

Abstract

Healthcare delivery is one of the crucial services in every country. While the education sector train health professionals, the available health facilities are unable to employ majority of the qualified health professionals to offer the required essential services. This leads to the unemployment of qualified health professionals in some countries. In this paper, we focus on the case of Ghana, West Africa to develop a conceptual framework on how to utilize mobile technology to deliver basic healthcare services and to create employment opportunities. This framework ensures registration of graduate nurses/health professionals to assist in delivering basic healthcare services to mobility challenged including aged persons. Identified gaps in the delivery of basic healthcare services in Ghana were taken into consideration in formulating the proposed conceptual framework to guide the implementation of a mHealth application. Data was collected from five (5) healthcare professionals and fifteen (15) patients from a hospital in the Volta region of Ghana. The data collected was used to evaluate the proposed framework and the finding suggests that health professionals who are the respondents do not utilize mobile phone platforms in healthcare delivery to aged persons in Ghana. Similarly, respondents who are patients would like to use mobile phone platform to request for the service of healthcare professional.