Factors Affecting the Behavioral Intention to Use Standalone Electronic Personal Health Record Applications by Adults in Egypt

Abstract

Standalone electronic personal health record can be a useful tool that enables individuals to store, arrange and share their health information easily and they can build a history of their health timeline which is crucial for raising healthcare quality and better self-management, the adoption rate of these applications has been identified in several countries to be low and slowly progressing.

Although there are some applications of standalone ePHR available in the market for usage free of charge but it’s almost not adopted at all, this study will investigate some of the factors that might affect the adoption of ePHR technology by adults in Egypt and provide business professionals a better picture for what can motivate or hinder the adoption process to achieve better adoption rates and eliminate the barriers.

In order to ensure a comprehensive contextual analysis, researchers analyzed the research in hand with the perspective of the proposed contextual framework, the Nine Elements Framework/Model (Elsafty, 2018) that analyzes social studies research in general, and business/management reseaerches as well.

Using the nine elements framework, the authors used it to discover the underlying factors that are causing the problems faced by the research in hand, and resulted in the coming contextual analysis defining the research scope and focus, which in the case of this paper is on Perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were adapted from TAM that was initially developed by Fred Davis (1989) and they proved to have a high predictive power of behavioral intention in CHI context, The extensions of TAM including UTAUT & UTAUT2 seems to be irrelevant to this research context since UTAUT is more oriented towards the organizational context (Venkatesh et al., 2012) and UTAUT2 added factors, Price value seems to be irrelevant in this research context as we are already studying platforms that are provided free of charge, Hedonic motivation maybe irrelevant to this context as healthcare related service is mostly associated with seriousness and urgency, also testing unimplemented platforms that are not yet adopted makes from the habit unrealistic experience that may be inaccurate to measure.

Since other several researches recommended extending these factors with other additional factors to make it more relevant to the healthcare consumer context (Kim & Park, 2012), these factors may include health-related factors, technology-related factors and personal-related factors. Findings in this research revealed that adoption rate in Egypt is still very low and high demand for this service which makes this research is significant as it’s trying to find out the reasons behind this gap, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, (privacy and security), eHealth literacy, personalization and awareness had a significant impact on behavioral intention to use standalone ePHR applications. Personalization was found to have the strongest effect on behavioral intention followed by perceived usefulness. Health status was found to have an insignificant effect on behavioral intention which indicates the interest of people with different health statuses in standalone ePHR.