Assessment E-health Readiness for Rural South African Areas Mmamolefe R. Kgasi Tshwane University of Technology, Department of End User Computing, Pretoria South Africa kgasiMR@tut.ac.za Billy M. Kalema Tshwane University of Technology, Department of Informatics, Pretoria, South Africa kalemabm@tut.ac.za Abstract—E-health is increasingly being used to address the long-standing gap of inequality in the provision of health care in many countries especially to bridge the divide between the urban rich and the rural poor. However, to increase the chances of e-health success, it is paramount to assess its readiness among the health institutions that are intending to implement it. The major objective of this paper therefore was to investigate the determinants of e-health readiness. Based on the literature, this study used five constructs of core, engagement, structural, societal and acceptance and use readiness to formulate a framework for e-health readiness assessment. A close-ended questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants of the rural area of Moses Kotane Municipality of South Africa. Principal component analysis was used to analyze the identified attributes and rank them in the order of their importance. Results showed that the need change readiness attribute contributes high for e-health readiness. The developed framework is expected to practically contribute to the health institution’s preparedness as it will be used as a cornerstone during the implementation of e-health. Index Terms—E-health, E-readiness, E-health readiness assessment, south africa, healthcare delivery I. INTRODUCTION Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have proved vital in providing tools and knowledge that are needed for the improvement of health care. The use of ICT related tools enable solutions that benefit patients, healthcare professionals and countries in both the private and public sectors. Using ICT to enhance the provision of health services (e-health) is seen as a vehicle for the transformation of health conditions in the developing nation more especially for people living in rural and remote areas. However, rural areas in many developing countries are disadvantaged in many ways ranging from poor communication networks, lack of employment, and poor access to government services to acquisition of basic needs. Manuscript received September 12, 2013; revised November 25 , 2013. Consequently, medical centres in rural areas are poorly facilitated making them impossible to handle medical cases of the many patients that depend on them. Researchers[1], [2] noted that, apart from lack of facilities and medical personnel, medical centers in rural areas also experience fragmented and inaccessible clinical information. They put it that, this adversely affects the cost and quality of healthcare provided and end up compromising the patient’s safety due to increased medical errors. On the other hand, [3] added that, accurate and detailed patient information is critical for healthcare professionals, medical researchers, health administrators, patients, and policymakers in making informed decisions regarding diverse issues in healthcare. They hence suggested the deployment of e-health in medical centers especially for those with fewer personnel. By using e-health, healthcare providers’ efficiency can be accelerated, information sharing can be improved, diseases controlled and overall healthcare system bettered [4], [5]. More over the outstanding challenge is that, e- health requires huge ICT investment that in many cases is not extended to centers in rural areas [2]. As a result, this could lead to failure in the implementation process. However, it is important note that, the unsuccessful implementation of any technological innovation is tantamount to great losses in terms of time, money and effort. Hence, such failures could be avoided by examining and mitigate the social, political, organizational, infrastructure and technological factors that influence technological innovations implementation [6]. This calls for the assessment of e-health readiness in rural areas more especially for developing nations. This study sought to contextualize a framework for e- health assessment in rural South African areas. Data for the study was collected from Moses Kotane Municipality in the Northwest of South Africa. The collected data was analyzed quantitatively by using the Principal component analysis (PCA). II. E-HEALTH AND E-HEALTH READINESS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2014 2014 Engineering and Technology Publishing 131 doi: 10.12720/jiii.2.2.131-135