Abstract:

We are living in a high-tech civilization where most areas of human life are combined with technology. Similarly the healthcare sector development is based on innovative and more and more advanced procedures, applications and technological devices. E-medicine and m-health are considered to be the tools not only to enhance the services quality but also to manage information, human resources and finance in the health sector better. E-solutions are to counteract medical personnel deficits and to decrease growing medical care costs in ageing societies across the world. The forecasts are promising.

A possible obstacle to a fast and effective m-health implementation into the daily medical services is the patient himself. The survey performed in the Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz (OCB) has demonstrated a poor openness of senior citizens to the innovative use of technologies in the patient and health-facility relationship. Requested to participate in the e-survey and to evaluate the quality of the hospital and out-patient services by sending an SMS, the senior citizens did not do it in a way which would be satisfactory. The possibility of evaluating the hospital operation quality, justified for many, was used by applying the traditional structured interview procedure; face to face with the interviewer. As a result, the project ended up with the number of text massages being definitely unrepresentative. The project failure made the project scenario to be revised and the data had to be supplemented with individual in-depth interviews. The enhanced data provided a better insight into the problem under study and, when discussed, facilitated defining a number of personal, situational, environmental and cultural barriers which considerably limited the participation of senior users in the project of innovative use of mobile phones for e-survey.

The authors go beyond the experience of the project of e-survey in OCB and further than just discussing their own results by providing a critical analysis of the computer science teaching methodology and strategies of developing and improving IT competencies in senior citizens and considering such competencies to be the cause of senior citizens not being open to health sector informatization and various m-health offers.

Keywords:

Ageing, information technology (IT), m-health, quality of life (QOL), client survey.