icegov2012 proceedings

countries in Africa where people are not able to make informed
decisions on their daily lives because of lack of access to ICTs,
information and knowledge.”
Ghana’s response to the above realities especially in the health
sector is the focus of this paper with the recognition of the
positive potential of mobile phones. The background of this paper
will review ICT integration at both practice and policy levels in
general and investigate attempts by Ghana, to initiate, formulate
and implement national e-strategies with a view to achieving
development goals. Section, 2 will focus on a short history of
ICTs under eHealth. The analysis in this section will be on how
developing countries disadvantaged due to lack of capital and
knowledge of the internet and Information Technology [42] could
carve out solutions which harness ICTs to improve internal
administrations, with the potential for interactions with
stakeholders to attain improved political representation,
institutional effectiveness and economic management. Sections 3
and 4 outline the general framework for analyzing the solutions or
interventions through mobile telephony, with Ghana country data
used, Section 5 dwells on acceptance, sustainability and
acceptance impacts. Section 6 focuses on a review of the results,
their implications, and concludes on possible future research
directions.
2. BACKGROUND
[52] stresses that response to considerable challenges in providing
high quality, affordable and universally accessible care have led to
policymakers, donors and program implementers to search for
innovative approaches, to eliminate the geographical and financial
barriers to health. Consequently, lately, there has been an
increasing interest in the potential of ICTs in resolving these
issues. The use of mobile technology or m-health, a subset of ehealth,
is growing in the low- and – middle income or developing
countries.
There is also the recognition that National e-strategies act as
fundamental preconditions for bridging the digital divide, that is,
the gap between people with access to ICT and those with limited
or no access to them [30]; [36]. Further, e-strategies are believed
to enable socio-economic development. The WSIS outcomes,
according to the ITU, encourage countries to incorporate ICT into
their national development plans and, in the particular case of
lower income economies, to integrate national e-strategies into
their poverty reduction plans. It defines for a better understanding
of the concepts; ‘ICT strategy is a general plan on how to bring a
society and its economy forward through the use of ICT; sectoral
e-strategies, on the other hand, break down the general ICT
strategy into policies for specific sectors, such as health, education
or administration. Sectoral strategies are called “e” for electronic,
followed by the name of the area the strategy applies to, for
instance, e-health, e-learning or e-government. Together, ICT
strategies and sectoral e-strategies constitute national e-strategies,
which is the super-ordinate concept.’ As of April 2010, 163
countries and territories, that is, 85.3 percent of all ITU Member
States, already had a national e-strategy in place, while another 13
countries and territories (6.8%) are currently formulating and
adopting one. Six countries (3.2%) do not have a national estrategy
in place, and the status of ICT strategy formulation in the
remaining 9 economies (4.7%) is unknown, due to lack of
information, the report declares. It is possible, however, that some
of the economies in the latter group have also formulated an ICT
370
strategy or are in the preparatory process. In general, Africa is the
continent with the lowest penetration of ICT, continued [30], as
well as the region where the formulation of ICT strategies has
taken place at the slowest pace. By the first phase of WSIS in
2003, only 17 African countries had developed ICT strategies.
According to a recent ECA survey however, 90 percent of the
African countries consider ICT as their national priority. As
suggested by the ITU, “Several ICT strategies are still lacking a
real strategic approach. Despite the existence of numerous good
practices and innovative and forward-looking strategies, some
plans are merely a collection of initiatives and projects.
Governments, societies and economies would benefit from an
overarching strategic direction and from the formulation of a
long-term vision. Further, sectoral e-strategies should be rooted in
these overarching national e-strategies in order to unleash the full
potential of ICT in each sector, making best use of existing
synergies.” For instance, there should be coherence between a
country’s health sectoral strategy and the National ICT Policy.
The ICT4AD which was approved by the Ghanaian Parliament
and Cabinet in early 2004 fully takes into account the aspirations
and provisions of key socio-economic development framework
documents including: The Vision 2020 Socio-Economic
Development Framework; the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy
(GPRS) (2002-2004) and the Co-ordinated Programme for
Economic and Social Development of Ghana [18]. “The e-Health
Strategy means application of the Internet and other related
technologies in the healthcare industry to improve the access,
efficiency, effectiveness and quality of clinical and business
processes utilized by healthcare organizations, practitioners,
patients and consumers to improve the health status of patients”
[8].
Several other governments have developed e-health strategies.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines e-Health as “...the
use, in the health sector, of digital data - transmitted, stored and
retrieved electronically- in support of health care, both at the local
site and at a distance.” eHealth technologies are essential when
they are integrated into health services that meet basic needs, have
been proven to be cost-efficient and are evidence-based. They are
evidence-based when they meet well-defined specifications and
have been validated through controlled clinical studies or rest on a
widely accepted consensus by experts. Some of the benefits of ehealth
include faster and easier access to medical data; improved
delivery of healthcare services, in particular in rural and remote
areas, and the reduction of costs for healthcare services.
Many ICT strategies include approaches for the adoption of egovernment
which are the most common type of sectoral estrategies.
Many of these sectoral strategies focus on improving
the effectiveness and transparency of public administration
activities by making use of ICT in government-to-government,
government-to-citizen and government-to business. With its ICT
strategies in place, Ghana’s Minister of Communications reported
in October 2011 that, “in 2010, Ghana’s GDP expanded by 5.9%,
with the Services Sector (dominated by ICT) contributing 32.8%
and surpassing traditional agriculture.
The ICT/Telecom industry is therefore playing significant and
vital role in driving wider economic growth across the country
and contributing substantially to the government kitty” [40].