The Role of Gender in Pharmacists Attitudes Towards E-pharmacy Application

Abstract

There have been a number of projects conducted to provide health services by using information technologies in Turkey. The aim of these projects was to establish a platform to serve health services quickly and by the most accurate way. Although such systems provide various functionalities in theory, a new system has always been questioned in terms of its acceptability and usability in practice. In this study, a web-based application used by pharmacists for patient's medicine records and its registration, named as Medula, was tested for adoption of its use in Turkey. A model was developed upon 5 constructs: Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), System Factors (SYS), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Behavioral Intention (BI). It was evaluated by conducting a survey over 2169 participants all around Turkey. The results were analyzed about the adoption degree of Medula system considering gender differences by employing structural equation modeling. The findings demonstrated that there are significant relations between constructs as well as a significant difference between genders on the behavior of pharmacists. In addition to that, this study is important for being the first technology adoption study on pharmacists in Turkish academic literature. It is believed that the study will be a valuable asset for researchers in the field of behavioral studies in health information technologies and e-health.