The Adoption of Mobile Health Management Services: An Empirical Study

Abstract

As their populations age, many countries are facing the increasing economic pressure of providing healthcare to their people. In Taiwan, this problem is exacerbated by an increasing rate of obesity and obesity-related conditions. Encouraging the adoption of personal health management services is one way to maintain current levels of personal health and to efficiently manage the distribution of healthcare resources. This study introduces Mobile Health Management Services (MHMS) and employs the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to explore the intention of students in Executive Master of Business Management programs to adopt mobile health management technology. Partial least squares (PLS) was used to analyze the collected data, and the results revealed that "perceived usefulness" and "attitude" significantly affected the behavioral intention of adopting MHMS. Both "perceived ease of use" and "perceived usefulness," significantly affected "attitude," and "perceived ease of use" significantly affected "perceived usefulness" as well. The results also show that the determinants of intention toward MHMS differed with age; young adults had higher intention to adopt MHMS to manage their personal health. Therefore, relevant governmental agencies may profitably promote the management of personal health among this population. Successful promotion of personal health management will contribute to increases in both the level of general health and the efficient management of healthcare resources.

Physicians’ and Users’ Perceptions towards Wearable Health Devices

“…This makes it easy for physical practitioners to deliver health services in a better way to people from non-medical background. To ensure reliability, Cronbach"s "α" values were calculated from the scores of each construct [11,28]. Cronbach"s "α" values lie between zero (unreliable) and one (perfectly reliable).…”

“…Predecessors of BI are found to be Attitude and Subjective Norms. TPB adds Perceived Behavioural Control as another antecedent of BI [11]. TAM considers PU and EOU as two fundamental constructs influencing Attitude [12,13].…”

“…In initial stages of adoption, men weigh PU as an important factor than EOU, whereas women emphasized on EOU to a higher extent [14]. For implementation of mobile healthcare systems in healthcare organizations, attitude of medical practitioners does not play a vital role since they are just asked to adopt the technologies after the decision has been made by organizations [11]. Nevertheless, for MHMS, Attitude of individuals largely influences the use of the system since they are the end users [11].…”

“…For implementation of mobile healthcare systems in healthcare organizations, attitude of medical practitioners does not play a vital role since they are just asked to adopt the technologies after the decision has been made by organizations [11]. Nevertheless, for MHMS, Attitude of individuals largely influences the use of the system since they are the end users [11]. However, attitude and intention of physical practitioners towards these devices may influence the effectiveness in which these devices are delivered to people, which in turn would certainly influence people"s perception towards the use of these devices [16].…”

“…The survey questionnaire consists of three constructs, namely PEU, PU and AT with multiple items in each constructs. Questions measuring each item were in Likert scales from 1 to 5, designating "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" [11,28]. The survey collected basic demographic information ofpeople from both medical and non-medical backgrounds in order to compare their preference and perception about the use of MHMS.…”