IT specialists’ views

The findings from IT specialists indicated that medication safety has the highest ranked mean score among other barriers. The second ranked barrier relates to the financial barriers. As Amatayakul (2010) described, IT specialists stressed the importance of investment involved in providing e-health services.

IT specialists ranked connectivity of information systems as the third barrier that hinders e- health adoption in Saudi. As Altuwaijri (2008) has explained in his paper, our findings confirmed the issues raised in relation to the inability to access, update, share and integrate EHRs of patients. IT specialists stressed that technical expertise and computer skills are required to work with EHRs. They ranked this factor as the fourth barrier in their scale. Furthermore, most IT specialists support the adoption of the HIS factor, if the partnership issue with patients is addressed. This finding is also identified as one important reason for failing to adopt HISs (Altuwaijri, 2011 and Khalifa, 2013).

Security and privacy are ranked sixth, impeding the adoption of e-health in Saudi. The literature has identified many factors that can affect the privacy of patients’ information, such

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as ease of access to such information without permission (Khalifa, 2013). On the contrary, respondents from the IT specialists group stressed the use of various security and privacy mechanisms to ensure confidentiality of patients’ information. IT specialists’ ranking of e- health barriers is shown in Figure 5.4.

Besides the ranking of e-health barriers, the analyses from the questionnaire show various e- health barriers in Saudi Arabia. Each group of respondents identified a number of factors that hinder successful utilisation and implementation of e-health (see Figure 5.5). According to the citizens, the questionnaire identified eight sub-barriers, such as negative beliefs, lack of trust, resistance to change, preference of physical interaction, absence of a national healthcare system, poor interface design, no guidelines and poor maintenance. Healthcare professionals indicated eight sub-barriers. Most respondents from this group of participants indicated the sub-barriers as deficient technical support, lack of trust, resistance to change, preference of physical interaction, absence of a national healthcare system, poor interface design, poor maintenance, and easy in accessing patients' medical records. IT specialists complained about the three sub-barriers of planning, IT infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, which contributes to the absence of a national healthcare system sub-barrier, and the very costly to adopt IT in health, which was identified by the concerns of high cost for adoption HISs and funding difficulties.

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5.5 Conclusion

E-health solutions provide promising tools and techniques that can enhance the healthcare services in Saudi Arabia. The current research proposes to develop a framework to integrate KM and KD to support the provision of e-health services to citizens in the kingdom. However, it was important to investigate first the current e-health barriers met not only by citizens but also healthcare professionals and IT specialists. These barriers will strengthen the proposed integrated framework.

Ranking e-health barriers in Saudi Arabia from the perspectives of Saudi Arabian citizens, healthcare professionals and IT specialists will enable the provision of e-health solutions for each stakeholder. Eight factors identified from the literature were perceived to be hindering e-health utilisation in Saudi Arabia. In this research, we investigated the eight barriers and ranked them from the point of view of each group of respondents. The analysis of the questionnaires shows that citizens and healthcare professionals perceive the lack of connectivity of HISs in Saudi Arabia to be the main reason for the failure of e-health, whereas IT specialists believe that the lack of medication safety is the biggest obstacle factor leading to such a failure. The results will assist us in developing a knowledge management system to assist healthcare and IT professionals to provide the best support to diabetic citizens in Saudi Arabia by considering these barriers. Beside the aim of the proposed framework to overcome such complications, the framework can be effectively utilised to overcome the e-health barriers identified in the current chapter to satisfy the needs of e-health users in the kingdom. Additionally, the findings of this study can contribute to successful utilisation of different e-health initiatives in the kingdom by increasing the awareness to these issues.

This research has focused on the diabetes mellitus domain application to illustrate the ability of our proposed framework, taking into consideration the identified barriers associated with e-health provision. Chapter Six seeks to investigate the specific issues faced by citizens suffering from diabetes mellitus in order to provide them with an effective e-health support.

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6.

Chapter Six: Data Mining Pilot Study for Diabetic Citizens in

Saudi Arabia

6.1 Introduction

This chapter presents the DM pilot study. The aim of DM is to discover knowledge which is hidden in databases, surveys and spreadsheets. The hidden knowledge, which is tacit, can provide useful insights to decision- and policy-makers. Its elicitation can contribute significantly to the externalisation, and strengthen the internalisation, socialisation and combination knowledge dimensions, of the SECI model.

To illustrate this integration of DM and KM, we focus in this study on a specific area of healthcare related to diabetes mellitus, as this illness is of great concern in Saudi Arabia, as discussed in Chapter Two. This chapter implements the CRISP-DM methodology adopted to collect and mine the data using the association rule algorithm described in Chapter Three.

As the proposed framework contains a KD layer to support Saudi Arabian diabetic citizens, the DM pilot study is performed to extract associations of non-health-related complications of diabetes mellitus and profile information of citizens of diabetes mellitus in Saudi Arabia. The SECI model, which constitutes the third layer in the proposed framework, is also deployed in the final step of this pilot study. This integration of the DM and SECI models forms a useful tool for delivering self-management and education solutions to empower diabetic citizens in Saudi Arabia to successfully control their disease.