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Modeling Patients' Acceptance of Provider-delivered E-health

Affiliations of the authors: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI (EVW); Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI (NKL).

Correspondence and reprints: E. Vance Wilson, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 742, Milwaukee, WI 53201; e-mail: <wilsonv{at}uwm.edu>.

Received for publication: 10/08/03; accepted for publication: 02/18/04.

Objective: Health care providers are beginning to deliver a range of Internet-based services to patients; however, it is not clear which of these e-health services patients need or desire. The authors propose that patients' acceptance of provider-delivered e-health can be modeled in advance of application development by measuring the effects of several key antecedents to e-health use and applying models of acceptance developed in the information technology (IT) field.

Design: This study tested three theoretical models of IT acceptance among patients who had recently registered for access to provider-delivered e-health.

Measurements: An online questionnaire administered items measuring perceptual constructs from the IT acceptance models (intrinsic motivation, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness/extrinsic motivation, and behavioral intention to use e-health) and five hypothesized antecedents (satisfaction with medical care, health care knowledge, Internet dependence, information-seeking preference, and health care need). Responses were collected and stored in a central database.

Results: All tested IT acceptance models performed well in predicting patients' behavioral intention to use e-health. Antecedent factors of satisfaction with provider, information-seeking preference, and Internet dependence uniquely predicted constructs in the models.

Conclusion: Information technology acceptance models provide a means to understand which aspects of e-health are valued by patients and how this may affect future use. In addition, antecedents to the models can be used to predict e-health acceptance in advance of system development.