Prioritizing and Overcoming Barriers to e-Health Use among Elderly People: Implementation of the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP)

Abstract

Rise in the aging population brings new challenges to modern societies. Old age is associated with several morbidities and usual issues related to health. Therefore, the provision of healthy and timely care has become the dire need to maintain their quality of life and wellbeing. The evolution of the e-health care system put pressure on societies to implement it successfully to ensure a safe and prompt provision of care services to the most vulnerable population successfully. Therefore, the provision and implementation of the e-health care system is a challenge for the health industry in terms of multi-objective decision-making. Multicriteria decision-making is a generalizable approach to making decisions with dependence and feedback and is known as an effective tool in decision-making processes, particularly in the healthcare sector. The present study aims to present an e-healthcare framework by identifying and prioritizing potential barriers towards the use of e-health by the elderly population. The analytical hierarchy process approach is adopted to calculate weights of identified potential barriers, respectively, and then rank them based on their degree of significance. The findings show that health and the ability-related barrier is ranked highest, followed by socio-environmental and attitudinal barriers. This research contributes to healthcare decision-making regarding e-health usage by implementing MCDA techniques. Our study will assist the public health practitioners and policymakers in drawing decisions on the best strategy to minimize the risks in using the e-healthcare system by the aging population, which significantly contributes to the smart healthcare system.