Achieving e-health success - the key role for ANT.

Abstract

Healthcare delivery continues to be challenged in all OECD countries. To address these challenges, most are turning their attention to e-health as the panacea. Indeed, it is true that in today's global and networked world, e-health should be the answer for ensuring pertinent information, relevant data and germane knowledge anywhere anytime so that clinicians can deliver superior healthcare. Sadly, healthcare has yet to realise the full potential of e-health, which is in stark contrast to other e-business initiatives such as e-government and e-education, e-finance or e-commerce. This chapter asserts that it is only by embracing a rich theoretical lens of analysis that the full potential of e-health can be harnessed, and thus it proffers Actor Network Theory (ANT) as such a lens.