Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 26, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 29, 2019 - Mar 26, 2019
Date Accepted: May 16, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
How resource scarcity and accessibility affect patients’ usage of mobile health in China: a resource competition perspective
ABSTRACT
Background:
The last decade has witnessed many achievements in China’s healthcare industry, but the industry still faces major challenges, among which the uneven distribution of medical resources and the imbalance between supply and demand are the most pressing problems. Although mobile health services play a significant role in mitigating problems associated with healthcare delivery, their adoption rates have been low.
Objective:
We aim to explore the impact of resource scarcity and resource accessibility on the adoption of mobile health from the perspective of resource competition, to examine the concerning factors and to provide a theoretical basis for promoting mobile health in China.
Methods:
We used 229,516 original registration records of outpatients to conduct an empirical analysis to examine the adoption of mobile health services from the perspective of resource competition.
Results:
This paper confirms that gender, age and experience are significantly related to adoption of mobile health, results which are in line with existing studies. Our empirical results reveal that medical resource scarcity and accessibility have significant impact on the adoption of mobile health. This paper draws attention to the fact that experience with mobile health has a moderating role in the relationship between resource scarcity, accessibility and adoption of mobile health.
Conclusions:
In this study, we demonstrate that the external environment has a significant impact on mobile health adoption. We confirm the role of mobile healthcare in the delivery and allocation of medical resources and provide a theoretical basis for government agencies to develop policies on mobile health.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.