A framework for assessing ICT preparedness for e-health implementations

Abstract

Electronic health (e-health) is probably one of the most significant contributions of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in present daypsilas healthcare. ICT efficiently bridges healthcare sector and technology for e-health implementation, which is a costly affair due to involvement of considerable amount of planning and investment. Preparedness, on the other hand can be defined as a state of readiness prior taking any action and applicable for implementing any e-health project. Study of preparedness essentially i) renders insight to the existing resources, ii) specifies the requirements for successful implementation of a project, and iii) helps set up strategies for the said implementation. Preparedness may be assessed at various levels of e-health implementations, such as ICT, Application, Service, Process and Government or Organizational levels. The present work focuses at the very initial level i.e. ICT and proposes an ICT-preparedness-framework for e-health implementation. The proposed ICT-preparedness framework is a conceptual one and is based on two different applications - A) connected graph-based approach to capture and in turn quantify some of the ICT constructs (Hardware, Connectivity, Software and Skills) and their respective indicators and B) a fuzzy set-based technique to assess the preparedness levels of these constructs. Finally the framework is discussed with an e-health scenario on Tele-cardiology.