Continuance Intention to Use and Satisfaction of Synchronous Distance Education in Healthcare in the Rural Areas of Taiwan

Abstract

A predicament Taiwan’s health care system currently faces is that people in rural areas lack of health knowledge and are reluctant to seek for helps from formal medical resources but instead take folk prescriptions and unidentified drugs Distance education in healthcare (DEH) is designed to help users via synchronously and asynchronously interacting with healthcare professionals to effectively and efficiently learn about correct knowledge of medical care such as health consultation health care and heath regimen The aim of this study is to measure the level of the satisfaction of and continuance to use DEH for the residents who have taken at least one synchronous DEH course in the rural areas of Taiwan and to understand their motives Expectation confirmation theory are used as the theoretical framework and five additional factors of learning content instructor characteristics teaching materials motivation and subjective norm are incorporated in the model The casual relationships among the constructs in the research model will be examined Confirmatory factor analysis are conducted to examine the discrepancy between hypotheses and empirical data and to test whether proposed theoretical model fits empirical data Subsequently structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to test the causal model and understand the relationship among constructs The results of the study are summarized as follow Satisfaction positively influences continuance intention to use confirmation and perceived usefulness positively influence satisfaction and confirmation positively influences perceived usefulness In addition satisfaction is positively affected by motivation but not subjective norm and perceived usefulness is positively affected by learning content and teaching materials but not instructor characteristics In particular the comparison of standardized path coefficients reveals that motivation has the strongest impact on satisfaction followed by confirmation and perceived usefulness Further the ANOVA results revel there are significant and positive relationships among demographic characteristics (i e education monthly disposable income and the times to take DEH) satisfaction and continuance intention to use That is the respondents with higher of education monthly disposable income and the times to take DEH tend to have higher level of satisfaction and continuance intention In the end managerial suggestions are provided for hospitals and DOCs in order to increase satisfaction and continuance intention to use in DEH

Date of Award	2015 Aug 11
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chun-Hsiung Liao (Supervisor)