Parliamentary Amendment Mobile Application: A Qualitative Approach about E-Government
Abstract
The adoption of innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by the Public Administration has been increasing in recent years face the challenge of optimizing public services through digital transformation (Field, Muller, Lau, Gadriot-Renard & Vergez, 2003; Bwalya, 2012; Das, Singh & Joseph, 2017). In this sense, e-government emerges strategically as a form of governmental action that uses modern technological solutions providing to citizens and organizations access to information in the most convenient way, improvement of public service quality, and more opportunities for social participation in democratic processes (OECD, 2018).
The public health sector does not differ from this reality by adopting technologies that help in the management of countless data on patients, procedures and policies. In this perspective, Brazilian Ministry of Health (MH), the institution responsible for National Health System (SUS) and public policies aimed at to promote, prevent and assist the Brazilians health, developed the Parliamentary Amendment Mobile Application, which is a practical e-government application, available on Android and IOS platforms. This application aims to make more comfortable, agile, safe and functional the management of the parliamentary amendments related to the actions and public health resources performed by the deputies, senators and citizens.
Therefore, entering information into a mobile application, in which parliamentarians and citizens could have all the data related to their amendments to monitoring their execution, with the option of activating notifications about the process steps, represented a challenge for the MH´s project team to develop a digital solution in order to deliver a large volume of information on public health resources. Researchers has carried out works to analyze the implementation of e-government in this context, although these studies are scarce, especially in developing countries (Twizeyimana & Andersson, 2019), which reflects the need to analyze the implementation of the mobile application Parliamentary Amendment, as an e-government initiative, for the management of public health resources and their potential to create social welfare.
In addition, the need to understand the challenges of implementing this application, in the public health sector, as a product of e-government, becomes relevant in view of the need for efficient management of resources for the maintenance and investments of the health public network, which in their absence, can cause serious harm to users. Face the relevance of the present study we elaborated the following research question: what are the attributes, functions, outcomes and interactions related to the implementation of the Parliamentary Amendment Mobile Application in the management of resources allocated to public health actions and services?
Thus, this research aims to analyze the implementation by the MH of the Parliamentary Amendment Mobile Application in the management of resources related to public health actions and services. To achieve this purpose, we used a qualitative multi-method approach through a triangulation of data collection techniques (Denzin, 1989) such as literature review, documentary research, participant observation and a focus group, the latter being held on April 2019, with stakeholders involved with the mobile application design (Jorgensen, 2015; Morgan, 1996; Scott, 2014) .
To increase conceptually and empirically the knowledge related to the phenomenon we analyze the data through content and document analysis and propose a framework for the analysis of e-government initiatives in the public health sector, with the following categories: attributes, functions, outcomes and interactions, as displayed in Figure 1.
