Consumer Use of the Internet for Health Management

Abstract

Although health information search might be the most common motive that consumers have for using the Internet for healthcare, they also use the Internet for other purposes such as healthcare management. To date, most research on consumer use of the Internet for healthcare has focused on consumers' search for health information, while focusing less on other activities of consumers on the Internet. The purpose of this study was to examine how Internet-related characteristics (Internet experience and trust in the Internet) and individual-related traits (confidence in self healthcare and general health status) were associated with consumers' use of the Internet for different purposes, such as healthcare management. Using a subsample of the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 4 Cycle 3 data, ordered probit regressions were conducted to test the hypotheses. The results of the study further suggest useful implications for public health policy makers, marketers, and healthcare businesses in terms of factors to consider in the successful implementation of healthcare promotion and management in the computer-mediated environment of the Internet. ARTICLE HISTORY

The Association Between Willingness of Frontline Care Providers’ to Adaptively Use Telehealth Technology and Virtual Service Performance in Provider-to-Provider Communication: Quantitative Study

“…Second, the result that habit plays a significant role in adaptive IT use calls for more attention in IS research on how users’ habits accumulate from different life domains to affect their postadoptive use of multiple technologies [91]. Previous postadoption studies have established that habit reflects the extent to which people tend to perform behaviors automatically because of past learning [69,92-95]. However, the relationship between habit and the continued use of IT has been mostly tested in a single domain; for example, mobile phone habits predict mobile phone use [93] and mobile internet habits affect mobile internet technology use [95].…”

“…Previous postadoption studies have established that habit reflects the extent to which people tend to perform behaviors automatically because of past learning [69,92-95]. However, the relationship between habit and the continued use of IT has been mostly tested in a single domain; for example, mobile phone habits predict mobile phone use [93] and mobile internet habits affect mobile internet technology use [95]. In a health care setting, however, our findings emphasize that cross-domain, habitual IT use influences care providers’ adaptive technology behaviors.…”

Can existing mobile apps support healthier food purchasing behaviour? Content analysis of nutrition content, behaviour change theory and user quality integration

“…It is possible that the nutrition information was viewed positively by users as it was congruent with their existing beliefs, but objectively such information is of a lower standard. Furthermore, measures such as user trust, ability and confidence are shown to be important ( 26 , 46 , 80 ) and it is possible that MARS does not currently capture these factors adequately. User engagement at all stages of development is important to understand the factors which influence the user experience and mobile app acceptability ( 81 ) .…”

Factors influencing internet usage for health purposes

“…Internet usage for health purposes Internet usage is an important topic to be discussed due to the rapid advancement of internetbased Information and Communication Technology (ICT) utilised in various fields (Ahadzadeh et al, 2015;Lee and Ha, 2016;Alhuwail and Abdulsalam, 2019). The Internet can also be used to facilitate social interventions that aim to change healthy lifestyle behaviour (Lee and Ha, 2016;Yang et al, 2017).…”