Evolution of E-Health in Saudi Arabia: Mobile Technology and M-health

Abstract

Medicine, to date, remains as an information intensive discipline since the onset days of practice. Back then, the pearls and nuggets of wisdom were orally passed on from one generation to another as well as through apprenticeship. At the base of health and medicine lies informatics helping to store, access and retrieve humongous amounts of data for patients,
conditions and ailments. Today, medicine and health have evolved to breed the present day medical practice built on tenets of electronic health (E-health). The modern trendy milestones enable rapid dissemination of new information such as outbreaks through electronic access to fundamental relevant sources such as electronic journals, shared patient data and other electronic reference websites. In a nutshell, e-health transformed and digitized the world to the benefit of medicine. In as much as having this information electronically available are beneficial, medical practitioners such as doctors are immobilized to workstations, centers and
immobile desktop computers. The next era in e-health involves gaining rapid access to storage and creation of materials in a convenient manner. A fundamental tool to this is a smartphone.
On its part, Saudi Arabia has developed a two phased e-health vision achievable by 2020. The author of this paper develops a masterpiece that will help nurture the next phase of Saudi Arabia’s e-health vision, m-health.