Integrated acceptance model of mobile healthcare service for proactive healthcare

Abstract

As many countries around the world, such as Korea, Japan, the United States, Germany, and China, have entered aging or super-aged societies, governments in each country are struggling with rising medical and healthcare costs. The average life expectancy has increased due to advanced medical technology and balanced-nutrition, but the healthy life expectancy, which means the period of disease-free status, has been getting worse. Therefore, the importance of preventive healthcare is being emphasized more recently. Most diseases can be prevented by management, and mobile healthcare services are gaining attention as a preventive healthcare tool. With the development of the IT field, such as smartphones and wearable devices, you can access the network anytime, anywhere. People are able to receive personalized medical and healthcare services based on the information collected and analyzed in real time at the place where they are without going to a hospital. With mobile healthcare services, users even have a consultant with a doctor from a remote location. In this thesis, three essays are composed to identify the effects of the life events, stresses, and health threats on the preventive healthcare attitude and the intention to use mobile healthcare services for prevention of diseases. This thesis also examined whether perceived values of preventive mobile healthcare services, social supports, and privacy trust can reinforce the use intention of the services. In Essay 1, based on data collected in 2013, at the beginning of the mobile healthcare services, perceived values related to characteristics of the services were divided into contexts and contents values to determine which perceived values are evaluated higher by users and recognizers. Both people who were under health stress and those who have curiosity to the services perceived contents values of mobile healthcare services, but the perceived values of recognizers were higher than users, resulting in lower than expected service levels. And it was found. With a data from 2015 and 2019, respectively, Essay 2 and 3 tried to identify the underlying process between life events and preventive healthcare attitude through stress and health threat appraisal. The process and the relationships are based on the theory of life course perspective, stress and disease, and protection motivation. Preventive healthcare attitude would be formed to prevent deterioration of health, which could be led by stress from life events. Furthermore, I try to examine which values and characteristics of mobile healthcare services would foster the intention to use the services. At this time, in order to select the perceived values of mobile healthcare services, literature analysis and big data analysis were conducted to derive important variables (monetary value to save healthcare costs, spatial and temporal coverage value to reduce efforts and time). In addition, due to the nature of the mobile healthcare service, there is a high concern about the exposure of personal information, so I added the characteristic to see whether it has the effect on the use intention of services. Furthermore, social supports, composed of family, friends, and healthcare professionals support, were tested because of their importance of beginning healthcare and its continuity. The analysis shows that not all life events form a preventive healthcare attitude, but a preventive healthcare attitude can be formed in the case of life-induced stressful events (Full mediation effect). Most life course perspective studies have assumed that all life events cause stress and an attitude to respond to the situation are shaped, ultimately it leads to a certain behavior. However, the results of underlying process between life events and preventive healthcare attitude showed that non-existent health abnormalities such as neuralgia and gastritis caused by stress may lead to preventive healthcare attitude in order to keep from ill health. In addition, all the perceived values were significant as a moderating effect to strengthen the acceptance of mobile healthcare services. The monetary value was the most significant, and privacy also promoted service acceptance. In using the mobile healthcare service, social supports also played a role to moderate the intention to use the mobile healthcare services. Based on these results, it can be said that the findings have implications for service providers to highlight key perceived values for marketing and to design contents development. The results of this study can help prevent disease exacerbations if a proactively preventive healthcare program would be provided through mobile healthcare services for people who are facing or are about to face stressful life transitions. Ultimately it reduces the nation's healthcare expenditures.