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Expanding communication networks and a growing increase in smart phone users have had a great impact on development and improvement of medical services (Lemaire, 2011). The opportunity to offer reasonably priced medical services to anyone, anywhere at any time has resulted in the development of a new concept called mobile health (mHealth) (Liravi & Bahrami, 2014). By increasing access to health care in developing countries, mHealth is resulting in an improvement in efficiency and a decrease in related costs (Telenor, 2012). By offering purposeful, immediate, on-time and interactive services (Akter, D’Ambra & Ray, 2013), mHealth improves levels of self-care, decreases doctor visits (Kumar et al., 2013), improves quality of life, and increases one’s level of access to personal medical information (Zhang, Zhang & Nussloch, 2014). MHealth improves the management and decision making of health care experts, collects immediate and location-based data, provides health care for remote areas, promotes knowledge exchange between experts, promotes public health, and improves responsiveness and patients’ self-care (Kamsu-Foguem & Foguem, 2014). Although these systems have many benefits, assessing the quality of a mHealth service is important (Nisha, Iqbal, Rifat & Idrish, 2016). Not assessing the quality of mHealth services results in users’ discontent, a decrease in efficiency and usefulness of these systems and increases costs caused by probable faults and errors (Brown, Yen, Rojas & Schnall, 2013).
Since wrong and insufficient information can cause significant damages to patients and users of medical services (Herrick, Gorman & Goodman, 2010), the quality of these systems and the necessity of having national and international standards for them has been the focus of many researchers and policy makers (Anderson, Sue & Manaszewicz, 2003).
In Iran, along with an increase in access to mobile software that offer health services, the necessity of paying attention to the structure and content of such services has gained importance (Rigby, Forsström, Roberts & Wyatt, 2001). Most research has been conducted regardless of general indicators of health services quality. According to a World Health Organization report, the main components of health services quality include: safety, effectiveness, customer orientation, timeliness, efficiency and fairness (World Health Organization, 2006). Moreover, considering all effective components when assessing the quality of mHealth systems (whether they are general aspects related to health services or technical aspects) is necessary.
This paper aims to comprehensively and systematically identify indicators for rating the quality of mHealth systems in order to consider the quality of four popular mHealth software packages that are available from Café Bazaar (Café Bazaar is a very popular website in Iran that provides cell phone applications). In the subsequent sections, we first examine the research background, followed by a description of the research method, before explaining the research findings. Finally, we present the discussion and conclusion.