The impact of service level on the acceptance of application service oriented medical records

Service level is considered to be the most important criterion in evaluating application services. In our study we empirically investigated how perceived service level (PSL) influenced healthcare workers’ willingness to use application service oriented medical records. In particular, we extended the technology acceptance model (TAM) by embedding PSL as a causal antecedent. We found that PSL explained 61% of the variation in ease of use, which is twice as much as our current understanding. We also found that TAM was validated when tested in isolation but failed within the larger nomological network. We provided an explanation based on the notion of conditional independence. We further applied TETRAD III to explore the phenomenon and discovered two spurious associations in TAM, successfully confirming the explanation. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.