Acceptance and adoption determinants of telemedicine in public healthcare institutions.

Background:  One of the challenges facing the usage of telemedicine technology in South Africa, particularly in the North West province (NWP), is lack of user acceptance by health care professionals which prevents piloted project to produce the desired outcomes.

Objectives:  The purpose of this study was to investigate the influential factors for the adoption of telemedicine by health care professionals from three selected hospitals (Bophelong, Taung and Klerksdorp) in the NWP.

Method:  The study adopted a case study approach and gathered data through questionnaires, which were distributed to the health care professionals of the three selected hospitals. In order to ensure that the instrument was accurate, a pilot study was carried out prior to the main investigation. Both the alpha and power values were set at 0.05 for the statistical analysis. The statistical tool used for the data analysis was SPSS v. 23.0.

Results:  Attitude towards the use of telemedicine technology (ATUTT), perceived usefulness (PU) and acceptance of telemedicine technology (ATT) were considered to be the influential factors in the adoption of telemedicine technology. The association between perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) (0.150, p = 0.034), PEOU and Attitude towards the use of telemedicine technology (ATUTT) (0.211, p = 0.002), PEOU and Acceptance of telemedicine technology (ATT) (0.245, p = 0.000), PU and (ATT) (0.212, p = 0.002), ATUTT and (ATT) (0.189, p = 0.005). However, PEOU was found to have an insignificant relationship with (0.048, p = 0.093). Hypotheses 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are supported while H2 was not supported.

Conclusion:  The study aims to fill the knowledge vacuum identified, helping poor countries effectively implement telemedicine technology to modernise the health care sector. In addition, results from this study shed insight on the varied impacts of individual, technical, clinical and multidimensional social influence variables on health care providers' decisions to use telemedicine.Contribution: This study contributes to the body of knowledge by investigating the success factors for telemedicine technology adoption in South African public hospitals. These results have important implications for the public health care system in South Africa, both for the direction of future research and for the methods used to promote the use of telemedicine.