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Background A three-dimensional virtual world (3DVW) is a computer-simulated electronic 3D virtual environment that users can explore, inhabit, communicate, and interact with via avatars, which are graphical representations of the users. Since the early 2000s, 3DVWs have emerged as a technology that has much to offer the health care sector. Objective The purpose of this study was to characterize different application areas of various 3DVWs in health and medical context and categorize them into meaningful categories. Methods This study employs a systematic literature review on the application areas of 3DVWs in health care. Our search resulted in 62 papers from five top-ranking scientific databases published from 1990 to 2013 that describe the use of 3DVWs for health care specific purposes. We noted a growth in the number of academic studies on the topic since 2006. Results We found a wide range of application areas for 3DVWs in health care and classified them into the following six categories: academic education, professional education, treatment, evaluation, lifestyle, and modeling. The education category, including professional and academic education, contains the largest number of papers (n=34), of which 23 are related to the academic education category and 11 to the professional education category. Nine papers are allocated to treatment category, and 8 papers have contents related to evaluation. In 4 of the papers, the authors used 3DVWs for modeling, and 3 papers targeted lifestyle purposes. The results indicate that most of the research to date has focused on education in health care. We also found that most studies were undertaken in just two countries, the United States and the United Kingdom. Conclusions 3D virtual worlds present several innovative ways to carry out a wide variety of health-related activities. The big picture of application areas of 3DVWs presented in this review could be of value and offer insights to both the health care community and researchers.

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In the past three decades, several studies have extracted antecedents to the user adoption of health information systems (HIS). This study proposes a reflective pause on the HIS adoption literature to broaden our understanding of factors contributing to the user adoption of electronic medical record (EMR). This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the factors influencing the user adoption of EMR and classifies these factors into meaningful categories. We searched the selected keywords on several academic databases and found an initial set of 9,684 studies. We excluded papers on the basis of their title, abstract, and full text (89 remaining papers). The effectiveness of adoption theories has been explored based on the empirical results identified in the EMR research. Furthermore, according to the conceptualization of the factors in the literature, a list of 78 factors affecting EMR adoption was identified. These factors were classified to eight categories: individual factors, psychological factors, behavioural factors, environmental factors, organizational factors, financial factors, legal factors, and technical factors. The results have implications for researchers and practitioners, including policymakers, marketers, information technology (IT) professionals, health information management (HIM) practitioners, health practice managers, and EMR system developers.

Three-dimensional virtual world (3DVW) have been adopted extensively in the education sector worldwide, and there has been remarkable growth in the application of these environments for distance learning. A wide variety of universities and educational organizations across the world have utilized this technology for their regular learning and teaching programs. The current study conducts a systematic review of the published studies relevant to the application of 3DVWs in higher education. A search of the literature was carried out in eight high-ranking scientific digital libraries. Following scrutiny according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 165 papers out of 1402 publications were selected for review from a variety of disciplines over a 10-year time period. The systematic review process were summarised, a number of paper reviews were conducted and results in conjunction with applicability of 3DVWs in higher education were extracted. In this study, various application areas of 3DVWs in higher education were found and classified into 13 main categories. Additionally, implications for research and practice are presented to provide new directions for further research and practice in the field.