Community Awareness and Involvement: An Overlooked Security Control

The implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the healthcare industry has witnessed a tremendous growth in the recent past. These ICTs are often viewed as vehicles that can bridge the digital divide between rural and urban healthcare centres. They hold the promise of bringing resolution to the shortages facing the rural healthcare sector by introducing e-health solutions such as electronic health records, telemedicine and e-education. Furthermore, e-health solutions promise to improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve the quality of health service delivery. Therefore, ICTs have proved to be increasingly fundamental to the socio-economic development of nations. However, these e-health solutions are currently under-realised in developing countries, especially in rural areas due to various challenges. Developing countries face barriers to reach significant levels of e-health adoption. Existing research, in identifying these barriers, has grouped a variety of contributing factors into several categories. This study, in viewing these categories, highlights an overlooked factor which impacts e-health development and other ICT4D activities in the rural areas of South Africa. Community awareness and involvement, at an appropriate level, is presented as an important control that may reduce or even eliminate the prevalence of e-health solutions vandalism and theft in rural areas. The literature case reviews and main author experiences are mainly based in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa.