Formulating teleconsultation success model from knowledge management perspectives

• Main Author: Rohaini Binti Ramli, Ts. Dr.
• Format: text::Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Formulating teleconsultation success model

The last decade has witnessed the arrival of teleconsultation in healthcare where medical practitioners were presented with platforms for online consultations with their colleagues. While the advantages of teleconsultation have been well acknowledged, the issues of lukewarm acceptance among doctors have been identified to be one of the stumbling blocks for its success. From the perspectives of Knowledge Management, the opportunity to leverage on knowledge rich activities through teleconsultation is at stake due to medical practitioners’ attitudes toward the system. This study looked at teleconsultation acceptance and adoption from Knowledge Management perspectives, where the objectives have been identifying the determinants for teleconsultation success, which have been categorized into organizational, systems, individual and social factors. Another objective was to formulate a teleconsultation success model by adapting constructs from DeLone and McLean IS success model (2003) as the base for the systems factor, and Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour (1991) for the organizational, social, and individual factors. The constructs established for the model are leadership, outcome expectancies, knowledge content quality, system quality, perceive usefulness of teleconsultation, user satisfaction, subjective norm, trust, and self-efficacy. Use of teleconsultation system for knowledge exchange has been identified as the outcome. The proposed success model was validated using a cross sectional survey targeting medical practitioners from Malaysia’s public hospitals with teleconsultation system facilities. Out of 43 hospitals approached, 24 hospitals have agreed to participate, and 254 surveys were deployed. The survey has returned 124 responses. Partial lease squares structural equation modelling using Smart PLS tool was chosen to validate the model for it is the most suitable technique to address the exploratory nature and the small sample size of this study. Out of 15 hypotheses, 11 were met, confirming that the model is an acceptable fit. Knowledge content quality and perceived usefulness have been established to be the most important systems predictors to determine the use of the teleconsultation system for doctors’ knowledge exchange. The results have also demonstrated the importance of leadership in championing the quality of knowledge content as well as in influencing doctors’ use of the teleconsultation system. Similar to other Information Systems and Knowledge Management Systems studies, selfefficacy and subjective norm have been confirmed to positively affect the system use. While outcome expectancies affect medical practitioners’ perception of teleconsultation usefulness, its direct relationship to the use of the system is found to be insignificant. This indicates that medical practitioners may not be particularly concerned about the incentives for using the system, which is inconsistent to popular findings in other studies. Other noticeable atypical findings in this study include system quality‘s insignificant relationship with perceive usefulness of the system, as well as user satisfaction’s and trust’s insignificant effects on the system use for knowledge exchange. This study presents the ground for discovering what really matters to the medical practitioners in motivating their effective use of teleconsultation system from the perspectives of Knowledge Management. Discussions on the potential reasons behind the atypical findings have recognized and proposed the distinctive elements in medical practitioners’ nature of jobs and professional background to be the main reasons which have led to their reserved attitudes towards the use of teleconsultation system. The findings of this study can be instrumental to pave the ways for a better implementation of teleconsultation system as a Knowledge Management Systems in the landscape of healthcare services.