E-Healthcare Services – Actual Usage and Intention to Use among Indian Consumers

Abstract

The boom in the information technology (IT) has drastically changed the life style of people today. The electronic commerce plays a vital role in digital revolution by transforming the Indian consumer’s buying behaviour, and the usage of smart phones, internet, etc., have radically increased among the Indian consumers. The IT revolution has brought a profound renovation in healthcare services too. The huge health information on internet and various healthcare apps available in market have led to the emergence of Electronic Healthcare Services (e-healthcare services). In most of the developed countries people use e-healthcare services to retrieve any kind of information regarding health. This mainly saves the time and energy of the people. The information with regards to health can be obtained from open sources, healthcare apps such as diet apps, fitness apps etc. Moreover, the mobile health apps such as Practo, Docsapp etc., do provide anytime assistance to the users. Today, due to rapid increase in IT usage for healthcare services by the consumers, it is quite essential to the measure the impact of health information provided by websites and apps to their users. The e-healthcare can be viewed as the future of healthcare which is focused on providing quick, better and affordable services to the customers. Therefore, this study attempts to examine the behavioural intention to use and actual usage of the e-healthcare services. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed among the student community in Manipal, Karnataka, and at most 267 students participated in the survey. This study provides an understanding to the researchers aiming at identifying the factors determining the behavioural intention to use e-healthcare services and actual usage. Further, the study brings out the first order dimensions to measure the second order dimension of perceived value of e-healthcare services.