Abstract
Telemedicine is both effective and able to provide efficient care at a lower cost. It also enjoys a high degree of acceptance among users. The Technology Acceptance Model proposed is based on the two main concepts of ease of use and perceived usefulness and is comprised of three dimensions: the individual context, the technological context and the implementation or organizational context. At present, no short, validated questionnaire exists in Catalonia to evaluate the acceptance of telemedicine services amongst healthcare professionals using a technology acceptance model. This article aims to statistically validate the Catalan version of the EU project Health Optimum telemedicine acceptance questionnaire. The study included the following phases: adaptation and translation of the questionnaire into Catalan and psychometric validation with construct (exploratory factor analysis), consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) and stability (test–retest) analysis. After deleting incomplete responses, calculations were made using 33 participants. The internal consistency measured with the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was good with an alpha coefficient of 0.84 (95%, CI: 0.79–0.84). The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.93 (95% CI: 0.852–0.964). The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test of sampling showed to be adequate (KMO = 0.818) and the Bartlett test of sphericity was significant (Chi-square 424.188; gl = 28; p < 0.001). The questionnaire had two dimensions which accounted for 61.2% of the total variance: quality and technical difficulties relating to telemedicine. The findings of this study suggest that the validated questionnaire has robust statistical features that make it a good predictive model of healthcare professional’s satisfaction with telemedicine programs.
Highlights
At present there is no clear consensus as to the economic impact of telemedicine [1,2], recent evidence has shown it can be effective, provide efficient care at a lower cost [3,4,5,6,7] and enjoy a high degree of acceptance among users
These results show that the Catalan version of the Health Optimum questionnaire to assess practitioner’s perceptions of telemedicine tools is statistically robust
The ceiling effect was found in two questions, though this was not measured in the English original version, meaning that we are unable to conclude that it is an intrinsic characteristic of the questionnaire or a weakness in the Catalan translation
Summary
At present there is no clear consensus as to the economic impact of telemedicine [1,2], recent evidence has shown it can be effective, provide efficient care at a lower cost [3,4,5,6,7] and enjoy a high degree of acceptance among users. McKoy et al used questionnaires to assess the acceptance of a teledermatology service and reported that 82% of users saw it as a valid alternative to face-to-face consultations [10]. In another qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 32 healthcare professionals, MacNeill et al showed mixed points of view: while it was broadly welcomed by nursing staff, some primary care physicians were worried that telemedicine could increase their workload and it could potentially undermine their professional autonomy [11]. Whilst all the studies provided valuable inputs to help understand the complex heterogeneous effect of the participants’ acceptance of new healthcare models, it is of the utmost importance that any published evidence uses validated questionnaires to perform reliable and comprehensive evaluations [12]
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