Challenges of mobile health implementation in Rwanda : Technical perspectives

Abstract

Background: In Rwanda and all around the globe mobile technology has become the most successful and certainly the speediest adopted modern technology to enhance healthcare service delivery. It can be argued that setting up reliable technology and infrastructure is essential to ensure sustainability of mobile health applications. However there can be other technical challenges that can hinder the implementation of mobile health. Objective: The overall objective of this research is to reveal technological challenges of implementing mhealth in Rwanda and propose guidelines that would help healthcare providers, mhealth developers and decision makers to implement effective mhealth service delivery. Methodology: This is a qualitative research. This approach was chosen to gain an understanding of the technical challenges of implementing mhealth in a real-life settings. The data was collected using interviews with healthcare providers and government officials. For the general public the data was collected using online survey questionnaires. Data collected was analysed using thematic analysis. Result: This study showed the key technical challenges of using mhealth for the general public and healthcare providers. Among many other challenges identified, the main challenges were lack of system effectiveness and lack of trust. Other challenges were network connectivity, lack of awareness and lack of easy to use mhealth. Lack of technical expertise to implement interoperable mhealth was also identified as the main challenge by the government officials. In this study participants provided recommendations to overcome challenges that encompassed developing easy to use and effective mhealth trainings, ensuring privacy of patient’s data, increasing awareness on the use of mhealth, ensuring network connectivity as well as ensuring systems interoperability with existing health management information systems and other mhealth. Basing on those recommendations and identified challenges we proposed guidelines to implement mhealth in Rwanda.