The public healthcare sectors within developing nations face a lot of challenges because of constrained resources available to them. The South African public healthcare sector is no different. Although it serves the majority of the South African population, most of the financial resources are directed towards the private sector, which serves very few individuals when compared to the public healthcare sector. Apart from that, other challenges that the National Department of Health has to deal with include the lack of sufficiently trained healthcare employees who can work on the different levels of the public healthcare sector, as well as the burden of diseases such as HIV and Aids, tuberculosis and other chronic diseases. In order to improve service delivery, the National Department of Health is introducing Information and Communications Technology interventions that can increase efficiency and reduce costs, thereby improving the quality of service delivery. This research delivers an m-health application user experience framework to be proposed to the National Department of Health in South Africa, in order to assist in scaling up of m-health applications. The m-health applications that can benefit the South African population if scaled up successfully include those that can be used in remote data collection, treatment and compliance, accessing patients records, remote monitoring, communication and training for healthcare workers and applications that can be used for education and awareness. The study focused on three domains: the Human-Computer Interaction domain, public healthcare domain and Health Informatics domain. The proposed framework was realized by investigating mobile user experience components, mobile health requirements and the South African public healthcare domain components that contribute to the m-health user experience framework. This research was conducted through the interpretivist philosophy. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, an application of qualitative methodology was used. The conceptual theoretical framework was validated through a single case study approach by m-health user experience experts, who reside in South Africa. Data were analysed inductively. An m-health user experience framework was provided at the end of the study. An m-health user experience framework can assist the National Department of Health to look into design issues, address m-health requirements and put the domain needs in place, thus enabling the Department to successfully scale up implementations of m-health applications nationwide.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:9827 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Ouma, Stella |
| Publisher | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment and Information Technology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Doctoral, PhD |
| Format | xvii, 311 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University |
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