2.5.5: Success Factors for Mobile Work in Health Care

In the days prior to the global pandemic in 2020 the concept of using mobile technology to provide health care was still somewhat new and was being studied by researchers as a means of improving access to health care. Health providers considered the potential of mobile health care for several tasks, such as getting regular updates about patients, access to physicians for consultation outside of the office, the access of medical of patients through their mobile devices, and the potential of having a central location for the storage and retrieval of medical documents (Ammenworth et al. 2000).

A recent investigation studied mobile work in health care by building a theoretical model based on propositions that arise from looking at published literature about mobile computing. The primary objective of the study was to identify key factors found in the literature that influenced the success of mobile work within the context of health care, using a measure of net benefit as the instrument of comparison. The authors noted that the benefits for mobile work in health care has many factors that influence the net benefit (Chatterjee et al. 2009).

The authors stated that mobile work in health care is successful when health care professionals can enter patient and medical information into centralized databases irrespective of their location and can communicate and coordinate actions with other health care workers using multiple channels. Using these ideas, the researchers concluded that system, information, and service quality, are factors that affect the successful use of mobile technology for health care workers. They also concluded that user satisfaction would also be associated with a net benefit.

Based on the existing literature of the subject, the authors proposed the following propositions for their study related to use and satisfaction, summarized here (Chatterjee et al. 2009):

1. The extent of data processing capability of a mobile device will positively affect use.
2. The extent of data processing capability of a mobile device will positively affect satisfaction.
3. The extent of information access will positively affect use.
4. The extent of information access will positively affect satisfaction.
5. The extent of communicability will positively affect use.
6. The extent of communicability will positively affect satisfaction.
7. The portability of a mobile device will positively affect use.
8. The portability of a mobile device will positively affect satisfaction.

Several other sets of propositions were developed to reflect ideas for the structure of tasks, urgency of information, mobility of health care workers, information complexity, and system support. These statements became the axioms upon which the results of the study were be inferred. The statements are axioms in the sense that they were developed in consultation with a large review of the mobile technology research literature. From these propositions a deductive reasoning structure was developed that was used to draw the conclusions for the study.

As the authors point out, this research is not completely deductive in nature. The authors use the term hypothetico-deductive logic for this type of research, a term and methodology that has been used by researchers in the field of information systems. As we have seen, a purely deductive approach uses already formulated theoretical propositions. These propositions are then used to deduce what results logically follow from the propositions. Using hypothetico-deductive logic, the theoretical propositions only temporarily support results consistent with the propositions. The propositions are then tested using empirical evidence. If the observed evidence is not found to be consistent with the propositions, then one can doubt the validity of the propositions.

The credibility of the propositions was explored using an approach that included researching two well-known extensive medical research databases. These databases were searched for articles including terms like “mobile technology” and “hand-held devices” that appeared between 2005 and 2008. The abstracts of the articles were examined, and irrelevant articles were excluded, which resulted in 70 research articles being included in the study. Each article was then examined within the context of each of the propositions to determine whether the article confirmed each proposition.

The review of the literature reveals mixed support for the propositions put forth by the authors. Some surprising results were that the level of data processing capability of the mobile device was not associated with amount of use or user satisfaction. One possible reason for this fact is that health care professionals at the time tended to use the devices for simple applications. Further, the extent of information access was not associated with amount of use or user satisfaction. The reason, once again, could be the simple tasks that health care professionals used the devices for at the time. The overall analysis developed a small set of conditions that must be met for technology to be used and for user satisfaction to be high. These conditions include portability, reliability, and institutional support.

This type of analysis is interesting from the viewpoint in that it is essentially a deductive type of study with the exception that the propositions were proposed and then the veracity of the propositions were explored empirically. In pure deductive studies the propositions are taken to be universal truths, that every reasonable person can agree on without any analysis. In practice, propositions are based on experience, which is close to the type of study presented here. This study differs in that the propositions are taken to be reasonable but are then subjected to an empirical analysis to determine if they are reasonable in practical application.