Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Apr 6, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 6, 2023 - Apr 20, 2023
Date Accepted: Sep 23, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Social determinants of health and patients' technology acceptance of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic: A pilot survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Telehealth was largely adopted by patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many factors of social determinants of health influenced the adoption.
Objective:
This study aims to understand the social determinants of patients’ telehealth adoption in the context of the pandemic.
Methods:
Survey methodology was used to capture data from 215 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The study was guided by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the social determinants of health framework. The questionnaire included TAM variables (e.g., perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use), social determinants (e.g., access to healthcare, socioeconomic status, education and health literacy), and demographic information (e.g., age, gender, race, and ethnicity).
Results:
OLS regression was used to analyse data on SPSS. The results show that social determinant factors - safe neighbourhood and built environment, and economic stability are predictors of the perceived usefulness of telehealth adoption. Further, a moderated mediation model (PROCESS model-85) was used to analyse the effects of COVID-19 on the neighbourhood and built environment and economic stability. Perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness had significant positive effects on users' intention to use technology for both variables.
Conclusions:
This study draws attention to two research frameworks to address unequal access to health technologies. It also adds empirical evidence to telehealth research on patient technology adoption. Finally, regarding practical implications, this study will give government agencies, healthcare organisations and healthcare companies a better perspective of patients’ digital health usage. This will further guide them through designing better technology by considering factors such as social determinants of health.
Citation
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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.