Mobile Virtual Communities in Healthcare: Self-Managed Care on the Move

C. El Morr (Canada)

Keywords

Self Managed Care, Mobility, Virtual Community, Mobile Virtual Community, Internet, Web.

Abstract

Virtual communities have emerged since the Web has become a popular tool for the mass. Mobile Virtual Communities (MVCs) have been recently gaining more momentum in research and industry, and are expected to be the next step in the development of virtual communities. On the other hand, the trend in healthcare delivery is to empower patients to take care of themselves while they are carrying on their day to day activities away from the point of care. This trend, entitled “self-managed care”, is of primary importance in healthcare policies as it is part of the measures implemented in order to decrease the healthcare cost in the industrialized countries. This paper suggests ways in which MVCs can be implemented as part of self-managed care policies in order to enhance the patient life experience, and advocates that healthcare MVCs (H-MVCs) constitute the type of applications that may drive the adoption of newer generation mobile phone technologies.

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