Mobile Services Provide Value by Decoupling the Time and Location Constraints in Healthcare Delivery

Mobile healthcare services exist to improve outcomes, but they have the potential to improve output of service provision as well. Operations management research on remote and mobile healthcare interventions tends to focus solely on output efficiency and leaving the questions of output-outcome relations to clinical medicine. However, with preventive interventions output-outcome relation plays a critical role in defining life-cycle long costs, outcomes and production effects of the technological intervention. Healthcare operations management can offer a valuable framework for better understanding remote mobile service systems and their effects. In this paper we explore different types of efficiency implications using mobile phone based solutions as an interesting example. We discuss time and location constraints of traditional service provision and how mobile services can impact them. We conclude by defining a new approach to studying mobile interventions from an operations management perspective.