Virtual Communities of Practice: the Role of Content Quality and Technical Features to Increase Health Care Professionals’ Satisfaction

Knowledge management in health care sector poses a challenge for policy makers and international health organizations. Nowadays, virtual communities of practice (VCoPs) resolve many problems, which arise from geographical distance and expensive learning process in health care sector. It is used by health professionals and researchers, for improving health care services quality, by enhancing the knowledge of health practitioners. Whereby, satisfaction of using VCoPs is the nucleus its success, since, pleasant experience with VCoPs will lead to better “user satisfaction”, which in turn leads to increase the number of users. This study aims to identify the determinants of member’s satisfaction with VCoPs. We have also developed a VCoPs satisfaction model, based on the information systems (IS) success theories: the technology acceptance model (TAM) and DeLone and McLean IS success model. The proposed model can be used to evaluate and measure the satisfaction of VCoPs in health care sector.