Wireless Ehealth Applications: Are We on the Right Track?

Due to the proliferation of wireless technology in the past 24 months, emerging software solutions to healthcare problems assume the option of ‘mobility’ for many medical professionals such as doctors and nurses. Inherently these professionals are mobile and hence the assumption that mobile solutions would provide significant performance improvements is valid. However, due to the limited knowledge available to development teams about the various requirements of the healthcare, and due to the difficulty in understanding how the health information systems function at an organisational level, it appears that the wireless eHealth solutions developed to date appear to be performing below the expected level. This review paper, from practitioners’ identified various guidelines provided in developing wireless solutions and matched them with two specific solutions presented in 2004 HIC conference. The analysis, based on the presented information, indicates that there is a glaring gap between the practitioners’ literature and the current practices. Hence the question, ‘Wireless eHealth Applications: Are we on the right track?’. This paper does not attempt to answer this question but opens up a number of questions that will be investigated in depth in 2005 so as to seek answers to the wireless eHealth development phenomenon in the Australian healthcare industry.