Study On Influencing Factors Of Willingness To Use Online Clinic

Health problems are closely related to human propagation behavior,and it is very important to expand the propagation channels of health information.With the development of the media,the main position of health information propagation is undergoing a shift from offline to online.The world is gradually entering the "online era".Online clinic refers to a new inquiry mode in which users or patients consult with doctors through the Internet and gain medical knowledge,diagnostic information and treatment suggestions.At present,China’s online clinic service is still at the stage of development and promotion,with relatively low public acceptance and social popularity.Although online clinic service has attracted the attention of scholars both at home and abroad,previous studies have focused more on the concept,platform design,development strategy and other aspects of online clinic service,which are relatively extensive but lack depth.Moreover,from the perspective of information technology adoption,most of the previous studies focused on whether or not people are willing to use online consultation,and the research on individual adoption willingness and influencing factors is not sufficient.Therefore,this study introduces the integrated technology acceptance model UTAUT from the perspective of information technology adoption willingness,and adopts a mixed research method of focus group interview and questionnaire survey to explore the influencing factors of individual online clinic use willingness,in an attempt to fill in the lack of research on online clinic use willingness.This paper determines the research boundary of online clinic in this study,and defines the willingness to use online clinic as the initial willingness to use online clinic.First,the research method of online focus group interview is used to explore and analyze the variables that may affect the individual’s willingness to use online clinic.Based on UTAUT model,five core variables including performance expectation,effort expectation,social influence,perceived risk and perceived trust are finally determined.Disease severity is taken as the regulating variable,and gender,age and education background are taken as the controlling variables.Model building and questionnaire design are carried out.The research object of this study is potential users who have no experience of online clinic but know something about online clinic.Snowball sampling and convenience sampling were used to distribute electronic questionnaires,397 valid samples were collected,and SPSS20 was used for data analysis.In this paper,five significance hypotheses and five regulation effect hypotheses are proposed.Through data analysis,this study can draw the following conclusions:(1)Performance expectation and perceived trust can have a positive impact on the willingness to use online clinic,while effort expectation,social influence and perceived risk have no significant correlation with the willingness to use;(2)Disease severity can positively regulate the relationship between performance expectation,effort expectation,social influence and willingness to use,while disease severity has no significant regulating effect on perceived risk,perceived trust and willingness to use.