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

The application of IT has become significant in the health sector. Clinical 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 simply accepted by them. There is enough evidence to claim that healthcare professionals are not willing to accept and use clinical IT that interferes with their day-to-day work activities. If healthcare professionals do not use new clinical 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 fully 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 professionals 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 determining healthcare professionals’ intention to use clinical IT systems in Malaysia. The proposed model can explain 51% of the variance of physicians’ intention to accept clinical IT.