Telehealth Services System Failure

Systems failures could occur in any phase in the system development life cycle, and most of time a failure in an information system indicates that this system is no long performing the functions as expected. The system failure will be discussed in this paper is about the telehealth services system.

Telehealth service is a modern topic that emerged around thirty years ago, and there is not sufficient evidence of the actual system failure about this type of service because only few industries such as Missouri Telehealth Network are implementing this service; also, most of them have been continuously innovating and progressing but not applying in so many health care regimes . Because I am currently building a telehealth services system with other

The research pinpointed the fact that only 21% of patients felt satisfied and almost half of all patients experienced an unsatisfactory service. This dramatic statistics illustrated that there should have been a system failure when those hospitals were implementing telehealth services.

Following with this research, another research studying the safety of telehealth and telemedicine, conducted by Taylor P2 in 2005, used the research result above to synthesize the reasons that people were not satisfied with this type of service; the most significant reason was the high cost and requirement of technology. In previous years, telehealth services were mainly about using telephone to establish the communication between doctors and patients. There was not sufficient interaction between two sides; then, this so-called asymmetric information occurred and hurt the efficiency and trust of

The failure could have happened since the beginning of planning phase. The team that did this project might have not done the feasibility analysis appropriately, especially for the technical feasibility analysis. The whole team did not have the sufficient technical support, and this mistake underlied the whole system failure. Moreover, the mistake happening in the planning phase could have triggered the mistakes in further phases. The hospitals, furthermore, probably did not tend to rely on this service to generate profits. There was no financial needs or business model needed in analysis phase, and there was no enough previously successful examples for the teams and the hospitals to learn from. Therefore, these project teams and hospitals are real pioneers in this industry and there probably would be no reason to blame on these pioneers based on those