Critical Factors In Electronic Health Readiness Assessment Framework For Iraq Health Services

Electronic Health (e-Health) is an application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) across the range of functions that affect health. e-Health has become a sturdy and versatile platform that can facilitate the enhancement of information and services delivery in the health industry. e-Health readiness assessment is a basis for ICT investments in healthcare organizations. Assessing health readiness is impacted by several factors. Even though there is an abundance of evidence of the subject of healthcare in the literature, studies that have investigated the factors affecting its assessment in the developing countries is still limited. In Iraq, e-Health readiness is still in its nascent stage. Therefore, this study aims to assess the contribution of the critical factors leading to e-Health readiness assessment in healthcare institutions in Iraq. The proposed e-Health readiness assessment framework consists of four dimensions. These are Individual Readiness, Environment Readiness, Core Readiness, and Technological Readiness. The fundamental theories applied to develop the framework were Theory of Transtheoretical Model, Activity Theory, Resource Based View, Theory of the Diffusion of Innovation, and Institutional Theory. The proposed framework was test with a self-administered survey, involving samples of 211 medical staff and 104 technical staff from various healthcare organizations in Iraq. The data collected from the survey were analysed using the Statistical Software, SPSS and Partial Least Squares, PLS for Structural Equation Modelling. The findings revealed that a number of factors, namely Attitudes, Training, Government Regulation, Economic, Genuine Need of change, Acceptability, Compatibility, Availability and Affordability of the hardware and software, ICT Support Service, Network Reliability, and Privacy and Security, were identified to have the most significant effect on the E-Health readiness assessment of these healthcare organizations. The proposed study is useful to the medical and technical staff with regard to their beliefs in the use of e-Health. In addition, the proposed model in this study was validated to be more effective for the assessment of e-Health readiness in Iraqi healthcare institutions with experts agreement rate of 87.3%. These significant findings have crucial implications and valuable contributions in the body of knowledge of e-Health, smart computing in particular and information system in general