Designing Cost-Effective Telemedicine Camps for Underprivileged Individuals in Less Developed Countries: A Decomposed Affordance-Effectivity Framework
Authors: Li, Xixi; Rai, Arun; Krishnan, Ganapathy
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2020)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00637
Free telemedicine camps (telecamps) are emergent joint initiatives of healthcare organizations, national and local governments, and not-for-profit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with the goal of alleviating the health divide for underprivileged individuals in rural areas of less developed countries. Our study seeks to understand the effectiveness of physician-patient communication at telecamps with several salient characteristics: rural underprivileged patients, physicians in remote cities, and frugal telemedicine technology—specifically, videoconferencing—deployed in Hospitals on Wheels and appropriated by operators. We adopt a multiple-actor perspective, propose a decomposed affordance-effectivity framework, and combine variance and process perspectives to examine the phenomenon of interest. We collaborated with Apollo Hospitals, a leading hospital system in India, and collected multisource data from two major telecamps in rural South India. Based on an analysis of survey data from 216 telecamp participants through a variance perspective, we found support for the fit of patient-perceived media richness with two contingency factors—(1) disease diagnostic complexity and (2)…