Adopting Telemedicine In Health Care SystemPhysicians' Resistant Attitude Towards Telemedicine Adoption

Table of Contents

1.1 Topic Introduction1

1.2 Research Problem2

1.3 Purpose of the Research3

1.4 Significance of the Problem4

1.5 Conceptual Theoretical Framework5

1.6 Research Question(s)7

1.7 Hypotheses7

1.8 Literature Review9

References15

Adopting Telemedicine in Health Care SystemPhysicians' Resistant Attitude towards Telemedicine Adoption

1.1 Topic Introduction

The rapid growth of investment in information technology (IT) by organizations worldwide has made user acceptance an increasingly critical technology implementation and management issue(Cooke & Hutchinson, 2011) . While such acceptance has received fairly extensive attention from previous research, additional efforts are needed to examine or validate existing research results, particularly those involving different technologies, user populations, and/or organizational contexts. Information technology (IT) has become an integral, even a pivotal, part of business activities and processes undertaken by an organization(Dowswell, Harrison & Wright, 2010). As investments in IT by organizations all over the world continue to grow at a rapid pace, user technology acceptance has become an increasingly critical technology implementation and management issue. However, regardless of potential technical superiority and promised merits, an unused or underutilized technology cannot be effective. User technology acceptance has received fairly extensive attention from information systems (IS) researchers and practitioners (Davis, 2008). The issue has been examined across assorted information technologies and user populations, and a fairly satisfactory empirical support for respective theories or models investigated has been accumulated. T?? is an intention-based model developed specifically for explaining and/or predicting user acceptance of computer technology (Flower, 2011). T?? has been used as the theoretical basis for many empirical studies of user technology acceptance/adoption and has accumulated ample empirical support.

1.2 Research Problem

As the cost of health care continues to spiral up, the health care industry increasingly is looking to information technology (IT) as “the biggest levers… to re-make health care for the 21st century” (Anderson, 2010). Because investment in health care IT cannot reap benefits unless clinical information systems are used properly, physician adoption has long been considered “the holy grail” of these systems (Davis, 2009). However, physicians' adoption of clinical information systems is known to be slow. An understanding of physician acceptance of these systems is sorely needed.

User acceptance of IT has long been recognized by researchers as a major factors in its successful adoption. The more accepting of a new IT the users are, the more willing they are to make changes in their long-standing practice patterns and to both adopt and integrate a new IT into their day-to-day work activities. To predict and explain user acceptance of a new IT and to ultimately understand users' usage behavior, researchers have developed various IT adoption models.

The aforementioned models are general models for any users. They are not specifically targeted at the physicians. Empirically, all those models have received considerable support from studies using undergraduate students, MBA students, and so called knowledge workers from various industries. IT acceptance of physicians in the context of telemedicine has been studied by Hu and colleagues in a series of papers. Their results suggest that physicians differ from other types of IT users investigated in ...