Achieving m-health excellence

Abstract

Medical science has made revolutionary changes in the past decades. Contemporaneously, however, healthcare has made incremental changes at best. The growing discrepancy between the revolutionary changes in medicine and the minimal changes in healthcare processes is leading to inefficient and ineffective healthcare delivery and one if not the significant contributor to the exponentially increasing costs plaguing healthcare globally. Healthcare organizations can respond to these challenges by focusing on three key solution strategies; namely: (1) access-caring for anyone, anytime, anywhere; (2) quality-offering world-class care and establishing integrated information repositories; and (3) value-providing effective and efficient healthcare delivery. These three components are interconnected such that they continually impact on the other and all are necessary to meet the key challenges facing healthcare organizations today. The application of mobile commerce to healthcare; namely, m-health appears to offer a way for healthcare delivery to revolutionize itself and simultaneously address the critical areas of access, quality and value. Integral to such an approach is the need for a robust wireless model. We propose the Wi-INET (wireless internet, intranet, extranet) model as the way to deliver m-health excellence.