Taking IT Artifacts Seriously: Developing a Mixed Determinants Model of Assimilation of Telehealth Systems

A number of healthcare authorities are considering the adoption of telehealth into mainstream clinical care, bringing telehealth technology out of experimental settings into real life settings. To fully reap the benefits from a technological innovation, the innovation must be assimilated into the organization's work system. As most literature on telehealth adoption to date has focused on its evaluation (e.g., user acceptance), more work is warranted to understand how telehealth can be integrated into administrative and clinical practices and to identify factors that may impinge onto telehealth integration. Borrowing from institutional, structuration and organizational learning theories, we propose a research framework to address limitations of past work and to guide research and managerial actions while integrating telehealth in the workplace.