Healthcare Professionals’ Adoption of Clinical IT in Hospital: A View of Relationship between Healthcare Professionals and Hospital

Abstract

The application of IT has become significant in the health sector. Clin ical IT is considered as a strategic tool to improve efficiency of health care delivery and effectiveness of physicians in the health care sector. New technologies that change the traditional practice patterns of healthcare professionals in hospitals cannot be simp ly accepted by them. There is enough evidence to claim that healthcare professionals are not willing to accept and use clin ical IT that interferes with their day-to-day work activities. If healthcare professionals do not use new clin ical IT, all the effort, money and resources used for the implementation of the system have no result. However, factors affecting healthcare professionals' acceptance of clinical IT are still not fu lly identified. In this study, an extension to TAM is used to incorporate the unique characteristic of physicians, physicians' computer literacy and features of clinical IT. The extended model has been developed to chiefly address the issues of IT adoption amongst healthcare professionals in a hospital setting. A survey has been conducted to evaluate the model among 300 healthcare p rofessionals in Malaysia. The structural equation model has been used to test the model in this context. The results reflect the role of perceived threat to professional autonomy, healthcare professional-hospital relationship, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use in determin ing healthcare professionals' intention to use clin ical IT systems in Malaysia. The proposed model can exp lain 51% of the variance of physicians' intention to accept clinical IT.