The adoption of mobile healthcare by hospital's professionals: An integrative perspective

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Mobile healthcare Personal service availability Personal innovativeness in IT TAM TPB The adoption rate of mobile healthcare is relatively low in the hospital. In practice, a study of how healthcare professionals adopt mobile services to support their work is imperative. An integration of TAM and TPB, concerning both technological and organizational aspects, is important for understanding the adoption of mobile healthcare. However, mobile healthcare is a wireless device which is often used in a voluntary motive. Service provisions for pervasive and timely usage and individual psychological states are critical in determining its use. Accordingly, perceived service availability (PSA) and personal innovativeness in IT (PIIT) may be the important drivers to be included in TAM and TPB. This study thus proposed such a research framework from a broader and integrative perspective. The empirical examination showed high predictive power for adoption intention and the influential role of these important variables. For the last decade, wireless technologies have been growing pervasively in various applications in the business sector, such as mobile commerce, supply chain management, customer relationship management, vendor managed inventory and so on. However, it is only quite recently that a surge of mainstream popularity has motivated researchers to acknowledge the healthcare value of wireless technologies. Hospitals are the places closely related to people's health and medical professionals are responsible for the patients' health and life. Medical professionals are always very concerned about the risk or uncertainty when using new technologies to assist in medical treatments. Therefore, medical professionals usually tend to adopt new technologies later until they have become more mature and safety in their use. However, wireless technologies can be widely applied in many ways to help medical professionals complete their work safely and efficiently, for example, electronic patient records and real-time monitoring systems of heart rate variability. This creates a great need and importance for mobile healthcare in the healthcare sector. However, a recent survey by the Department of Health in Taiwan in 2008 indicated that the adoption rate of mobile healthcare for medical professionals is only 16.3% among all hospitals. Moreover, there are only 62 hospitals (13.7%) in Taiwan using mobile phones to perform wireless healthcare. More specifically, during the last several years, a gradual shift in the focus of mobile healthcare has taken place in hospitals. More and more medical professionals are considering using some …