Factors Influencing Sri Lankan Doctors’ Behavior to Recommend Online Purchase of Medical Nutrition Products

Abstract

Online purchase is becoming an increasingly viable alternative to in-store transactions due to constraints on in-person interaction. However, medical nutrition customers, mostly healthcare patients in Sri Lanka, are still apprehensive about purchasing products online. Doctors’ recommendations can positively influence patients’ decisions to buy medical nutrition online, but few researchers have studied this. This study incorporated the Unified Theory of Acceptance and User of Technology (UTAUT) to assess what influences doctors to recommend online medical nutrition purchases to their patients. This study utilized a quantitative survey involving 64 medical doctors in Sri Lanka and used partial least squares structural equation modeling for data analysis. The results showed that Performance Expectancy (PE), Social Influence (SI), and Effort Expectancy (EE) affect doctors’ Behavior Intention (BI) in recommending online purchasing for medical nutrition. This study will benefit the pharmaceutical industry in accelerating medical nutrition online purchases in Sri Lanka by leveraging doctors as social influencers to recommend online purchases and extend the application of UTAUT in the field.