The interplay of environmental factors in the acceptance of teleconsultation technology: A mixed methods study

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the influence of environmental factors namely the service need and
facilitating conditions on the acceptance of teleconsultation technology in order to enrich the
understanding of the teleconsultation technology acceptance behaviour among health care providers in
health facilities. The study was conducted based on the concurrent triangulation design involving
qualitative and quantitative study methods. These entailed interviews with key informants and
questionnaires survey of health care providers who worked in the participating hospitals in
Malaysia. Thematic analysis involving iterative coding was conducted on qualitative data. Scale
reliability test and hypothesis testing procedures were performed on quantitative data. Subsequently, both
data were merged, confirmed and interpreted. The results exhibited that the quantitative results were
fairly consistent with the qualitative findings. Based on the responses from 20 key informants, the actual
needs for the technology and subsistence of facilitating conditions were found to be important in
explaining the way teleconsultation was utilized. Concurrently, based on the survey engaging 72 health
care providers, the teleconsultation usage was statistically proven to be strongly associated with the
environmental factors. The prominent insight gained from this study was that the teleconsultation
acceptance was perceptibly driven by the health care environment factors. The study demonstrated the
importance of actionable factors that have existed in telemedicine diffusion that constituted a significant
role in the acceptance of the technology. In respect to future theoretical work, the findings can be
considered to conceptualize a further comprehensive teleconsultation acceptance model.