Attitudes of pharmacists towards e-pharmacy application: A work in progress research on medula project

Abstract

In Turkey, there have been a number of projects conducted to provide health services by information and communication technologies (ICT). The aim of these projects is to provide health services in the best form and establishing a network among patients and health foundations. Although these systems provide useful functionalities in theory, they have been frequently questioned for user acceptance of these functionalities in practice. In this study, a web-based application which is used by pharmacists named as Medula will be investigated for its adoption by pharmacists in Turkey, which is also important for being the first study in pharmaceutical field in the literature. Influencing factors that affect user adoption were identified and measured by a survey study on pharmacists. According to the results, survey items were found reliable and applicable for the next study with a large sample group. It is believed that this study will be a valuable asset for the researchers and developers in pharmaceutical technology adoption studies.

Work in Progress toward Adoption of an e-health Application by Healthcare Personnel: A Model Validation

“…The initial outcome of the study was that, after the prior study on adoption of the system [8], the research improved in terms of hypotheses, model structure, survey context and semantics. As a result, in this paper, a new model (P-TAM) for assessing user adoption of a HIS was proposed and investigated for the next phase of analysis: Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).…”

“…However, the duration of the system use may vary based on their experiences. The prior study (Sezgin, et al, 2011) revealed that collecting data from the same region/province may be insufficient about understanding user expectations from the system. Thus, in order to increase representativeness of population, samples were composed of pharmacists from different cities around Turkey.…”

“…The previous study showed that face-to-face survey implementation is costly in terms of time, workforce and budget [8]. In addition to that, it is hard to conduct the survey and provide country-wide participation without organizational assistance.…”

“…Under the theories of TAM and TPB, the behavioral constructs of the model has been specified with the assistance expert opinions. In addition to that, findings of a prior (pilot) study [8] had been taken into account during the development of the research model. The behavioral constructs of the model represented influencing factors for system use, and they were selected as followings: Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), System factors (SYS), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), and Behavioral Intention (BI).…”