Understanding the Mediating Effects of Relationship Quality on Technology Acceptance: An Empirical Study of E-Appointment System

Abstract

This study extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by incorporating relationship quality as a mediator to construct a comprehensive framework for understanding the influence on continuance intention in the hospital e-appointment system. A survey of 334 Taiwanese citizens who were contacted via phone or the Internet and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used for path analysis and hypothesis tests. The study shows that perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) have significant influence on continuance intention through the mediation of relationship quality, consisting of satisfaction and trust. The direct impact of relationship quality on continuance intention is also significant. The analytical results reveal that the relationship between the hospital, patients and e-appointment users can be improved via enhancing the continued usage of e-appointment. This paper also proposes a general model to synthesize the essence of PEOU, PU, and relationship quality for explaining users' continuous intention of e-appointment.

Questionnaire survey about use of an online appointment booking system in one large tertiary public hospital outpatient service center in China

“…Moreover, to attract more patients to use WAS system, operation should be made even easier and more user-friendly by enhancing system service quality (for instance, webpage uploadingspeed, user-friendliness of webpages and search for information) and information variety (for example, to provide informationabout health care and outpatient pre-register systems) with Cloud Computing and APP (Application software) [8]. The current role of WAS is limited just as online appointment.…”

“…diabetes and high blood pressure) and categories (i.e. dieting and exercising) for self-control and management, disease-prevention, health remainders and checks, that would be tremendously encouraging for patients to use [8]. …”

“…Compared with other methods for booking appointments, WAS provided by hospital, usually displaying the largest variety of information on a hospital’s website, such as disease categories and physician treatments, should be much more sufficient [7,8]. However, only a small number of outpatient appointments were actually made through this system.…”

Examining the Factors Behind the Success and Sustainability of China’s Creative Research Group: An Extension of the Teamwork Quality Model

“…The larger the z-value, the more significant the mediation effect is; otherwise, when the calculated p-value is less than 0.05, the mediation effect is significant. The smaller the p-value, the more significant the mediation effects [62][63][64][65]. In Table 6, we use the relationship among our three constructs, specifically, ROTS-TWQ-SSCRG, to predict and test the mediation effect of TWQ.…”

Assessing the Online Outpatient Booking System

“…This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited time and any place, allowing the user to see the physicians' appointments (9), selection of the desired option, editing the recorded information, more favorable relationship between physician and patient, improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of care (5), cost reduction (11)(12)(13)(14), reduction of the number and volume of employees (7), saving patient information for use in subsequent appointments (11), and reduction of the number of missed appointments (9,11,(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). However, despite the importance of this system, a few studies have been done on its evaluation and existing researches in this field have investigated topics, such as designing a web-based appointment system (19), patient satisfaction of online appointment booking systems (4,20), development of information technology acceptance model for an online appointment booking system in hospitals (21)(22)(23), implementation and use of the online appointment booking system in clinics (15,20), and improving the management of appointments (24,25). There are limited studies in Iran on the need for smart systems to prepare an optimized program for patients and investigating the appointment-making system of private physicians' offices (5,22).…”