Abstract

Health care services is one of the most important domains in the world. One of most important goals of healthcare services is the need of make accurate healthcare decisions in the right time. Retrieving useful historical health records of patients in real-time is necessary to provide accurate healthcare decisions. Traditional health record systems like paper-based system require time and efforts to collect, manage, and retrieve patients2019; records. Electronic health record systems were adopted to allow health staff to retrieve useful health records in real-time and consequently improve and speed up healthcare services. EHR is effective to serve patients in their local countries. Although EHR is effective for local healthcare services (i.e. hospitals within patient country), the implementations of EHR for global purposes is still an issue. EHR is not applicable for the persons who travel to other countries. One of the most important travelling purposes for Muslims is the pilgrimage journey. Each year millions of Muslims travel to KSA to complete pilgrimage rites. Pilgrims may need healthcare services and these services should be accomplished accurately in real-time which requires historical health records based electronic approaches. This study aims to investigate the importance and viability of IoT implementations to support EHR retrieving of pilgrims using electronic tags. A questionnaire with 60 academic staff and interview with five experts from KSA were conducted to address the main aim of this study. The significance of the results show that EHR supporting tags reading is a promising solution to enhance healthcare services and avoid the challenges of EHR implementations in pilgrimage.