M-health: a new paradigm for mobilizing healthcare delivery

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 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. This chapter serves to outline an example of adopting mobile commerce within the healthcare industry, namely, in the area of a wireless medical record. In particular, it discusses an appropriate, feasible mobile solution to enable hospitals operate effectively and efficiently in today's competitive and costly healthcare environment as well as meet all the necessary regulatory requirements. The lessons learnt from these case study data should be of interest to both practitioners and researchers since they will outline realistic and feasible solutions to enable hospitals to incorporate a wireless/m-commerce solution as well as highlighting key areas for further research in this important area of high-quality, effective, and efficient healthcare management. © 2006, Idea Group Inc.