Rethinking ICTs and E-Health: A Focus on Issues and Challenges

Main Focus Of The Article

We argue that while e-health may help with issue of efficiency, such as cost-cutting, and instant access to healthcare information and records, its adoption and effectiveness is not as clear cut and may threaten the survival of certain medical practices (i.e., complementary or alternative medicine [CAM] that characterizes some of the non-western medical or health care services). In order to explore issues relating to adoption and use of e-health, we looked at the dimension of cultural variability (i.e., Hofstede, 1996, 2001) as a general framework given its wide appeal and established record in literature, especially in the adoption of an innovation such as e-health. In particular, the collectivism and individualism dimension of cultural variability is useful in exploring the difference between oral tradition and digital tradition cultures in terms of how they might adopt and use e-health. Specifically, we argued that the disparity between oral tradition and digital traditional cultures is such that information in oral tradition culture simply cannot be easily translated into written or digital one because of the art form implied within the oral tradition. Hence, the failure to recognize this important challenge may very well makes oral tradition cultures and their embedded medical practices extinct and consequently may hinder adoption and usage decision. This problem is not limited to e-health consumers, but may impact e-health practices altogether (Olaniran, 2012). First, however, it is necessary to provide an overview of e-health.