A task-fit measure of health information technology use

Abstract

Rationale, aims and objectives: Introducing profession concerns into the evaluation of health information technology (HIT) use is an important and developing practice. A comprehensive evaluation should include the intellect elements of HIT use. This paper proposes a task-fit measure of HIT that integrates an information/knowledge quality scale into a validated judicious HIT use measure. It also presents some statistics that have implications for policy-making and curriculum development.Methods: Statistical analyses were performed on a subset of survey data. A structural equation modelling technique was applied to examine the associations among intent to use HIT, professional concerns and information/knowledge quality.Results: The statistical results show that altruism, autonomy, physician-patient relationship, (subconscious) autonomy, digestible information and medical history associate with each other to different extents. Only altruism and medical history show to be significant determinants of intent to use at P<0.001 and P<0.05 respectively. The scaled χ2 difference test shows that this model is not significantly different from the judicious HIT use model.Conclusion: The statistical results suggest that professional concerns, digestible information and person-related information are HIT use decision factors. Perhaps physicians may prefer HITs considered to be compatible with practising the science, humanism and ethics of medicine simultaneously. This research direction will potentially contribute to identifying the task-fit HITs and the corresponding policies for re-orientating medicine to be a science-using and compassionate practice in this eHealth era, thereby promoting the development of person-centered healthcare.