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Top1. Introduction
The e-government is a concept enabled and supported by information communication technology (ICT), to transform a government’s activities, in improving services (Kurfalı, Arifoğlu, Tokdemir, & Paçin, 2017). The e-government is used to facilitate government agencies’ communication with citizens (Mutimukwe, Kolkowska, & Grönlund, 2019). This includes the use of the Thus, the concept has often defined as the application of ICT for better government administration and quality of service delivery (Gio & Lee, 2017; Ahmad & Campbell, 2015). This has innovatively been adopted to enable and support other services, such as healthcare (Cleland-Huang, 2014), but more in developed countries (Frankfurter & Cuervo, 2016) than in developing countries (Venkatesh, Hoehle, & Aljafari, 2017), specifically those in Africa (Fonou Dombeu & Rannyai, 2014; Nkohkwo & Islam, 2013; Lin, Fofanah, & Liang, 2011). The e-government platform is intended to facilitate exchange between health insurance and its citizens. Layne and Lee (2001) suggest that one of the major challenges in the development of e-government is encountered at the horizontal stage, which is the integration of databases from different government agencies, including healthcare (Fath-Allah, Cheikhi, Al-Qutaish, & Idri, 2014). This is a challenge that has, for many years, hampered complementarity of the concepts in studies and practice.
Even though the interest in e-government is increasing, its adoption in developing countries, Africa in particular is still very slow. Countries, such as Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, experience more challenges than benefits in their attempts to adopt and practice the concept (Ruhode, 2016; Ibrahim, Al-Nasrawi, El-Zaart, & Adams, 2015). Many programs in South Africa have not been effectively leveraged with the e‐government platform to enhance service delivery in the country (Mutula & Mostert, 2010). From Bwalya’s (2009) empirical study, it was found among other factors that inadequate ICT infrastructure and lack of contextualization affect e‐government adoption and practice in Zambia.
The application of e-health is intended to provide a possible remedy for addressing health challenges, including response time and other sociotechnical constraints, which affect many African countries (Leon, Schneider, & Daviaud, 2012; Justice, 2012). However, there has been slow pace in the adoption, and far less satisfactory approach in service delivery through the e-health concept (Landis-Lewis et al., 2015). Hence, the zeal and need to complement both e-health with e-government, to improve service delivery through inclusiveness and concurrent involvement and participation of the main stakeholders: government administration, health practitioners, and patients (citizens). Mouttham et al. (2012) describe e-health as a system that is mainly aimed at providing healthcare personnel with ease of access to information and resources, as well as ensuring security in the course of disseminating patients’ information to various service providers. Despite its current function, the e-health can do more if it is applied to enable and support a triangular interaction between its main stakeholders, government, health practitioners and patients instead of a one-way approach (Hao et al., 2016). E-health is not a system that is anticipated to substitute people’s actions; however, it is intended to improve or provide support to better healthcare service delivery to the community (Mouttham et al., 2012). Therefore, in order for an e-health system to be effective, services should always be available without interruptions (Leon, 2012; Justice, 2012), which the e-government has the capability to ensure (Gio & Lee, 2017).