Abstract
BackgroundHealthcare and social care environments are increasingly confronted with older persons with long-term care needs. Consequently, the need for integrated and coordinated assessment systems increases. In Belgium, feasibility studies have been conducted on the implementation and use of interRAI instruments offering opportunities to improve continuity and quality of care. However, the development and implementation of information technology to support a shared dataset is a difficult and gradual process. We explore the applicability of the UTAUT theoretical model in the BelRAI healthcare project to analyse the acceptance of the BelRAI web application by healthcare professionals in home care, nursing home care and acute hospital care for older people with disabilities.MethodsA structured questionnaire containing items based on constructs validated in the original UTAUT study was distributed to 661 Flemish caregivers. We performed a complete case analysis using data from 282 questionnaires to obtain information regarding the effects of performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI), facilitating conditions (FC), anxiety (ANX), self-efficacy (SE) and attitude towards using technology (ATUT) on behavioural intention (BI) to use the BelRAI web application.ResultsThe values of the internal consistency evaluation of each construct demonstrated adequate reliability of the survey instrument. Convergent and discriminant validity were established. However, the items of the ATUT construct cross-loaded on PE. FC proved to have the most significant influence on BI to use BelRAI, followed by SE. Other constructs (PE, EE, SI, ANX, ATUT) had no significant influence on BI. The ‘direct effects only’ model explained 30.8% of the variance in BI to use BelRAI.ConclusionsCritical factors in stimulating the behavioural intention to use new technology are good-quality software, interoperability and compatibility with other information systems, easy access to computers, training facilities, built-in and online help and ongoing IT support. These findings can be used by policy makers to maximise the acceptance and the success of new technology. For researchers, the conclusions of the original UTAUT study with regards to the item and scale construction should not be copied blindly across different information systems. A bottom-up approach is preferred when building upon the UTAUT model.
Highlights
Healthcare and social care environments are increasingly confronted with older persons with long-term care needs
As in the original study of Venkatesh et al [46], for practical analytical reasons the constructs were operationalised by using the highest-loading itemsc from each of the respective scales (Table 2). Given this specific healthcare situation, these items did not always accord with the highest-loading items used to measure the core constructs in the original UTAUT: only the items with an asterisk were selected for inclusion in the final UTAUT model in the study of Venkatesh et al [46]
This study shows that performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social influence do not have a significant influence on behavioural intention as shown in the original UTAUT study [46] and other related research on technology acceptance and use [45,48,58,59]
Summary
Healthcare and social care environments are increasingly confronted with older persons with long-term care needs. Healthcare environments are increasingly confronted with older persons, characterised by chronic conditions and/or comorbidities necessitating long-term care [3,4,5,6] and rising costs. There is a substantial shift away from institutional caregiving. This evolution increases the complexity of caregiving since multiple service providers are delivering care to individuals [3,7,8]. The need to receive support from multiple service providers has important implications for persons with complex care needs [9]
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