Telemedicine – Quo Vadis? Acceptance and Knowledge Exchange in Telemedical Applications

Not least since the advent of Covid-19, the significance of the health system and questions regarding the quality of healthcare have been at the center of public and political discussions as well as scientific debates. The digital revolution in the health system opens up value creation potential through IoT, big data and mobile health solutions. By exploiting (digital) information exchange and the generation of knowledge, these can generate added value for patients, medical personnel and healthcare institutions. Nonetheless the progress of the digital transformation in healthcare is lagging behind the rest of society in general. This has given rise to a conflict between digital possibilities and numerous inhibiting factors.

Despite the many fundamental benefits of (digital) information and knowledge exchange that are made possible by medical information systems such as telemedicine applications, further steps are required from knowledge managers and additional research on technology acceptance is necessary before they can be effectively implemented and optimized. These should take the type of knowledge content and cooperation as well as changes in digital skill levels and the organizational culture into account while also considering the adoption of health information systems by users. The research goal is to examine the benefits and the quality of benefits for health information system users and make recommendations as to how these can be improved.

To reach this goal, we will need to investigate the levels of technology acceptance and satisfaction among medical personnel as well as questions relating to knowledge management. The acceptance of telemedicine applications comprises the development and realization of all those actions that are aimed at the use of an information technology in its intended form. To this end, technology acceptance models and constructs from the fields of business informatics and psychology will be combined to develop an even more specific interdisciplinary theoretical model of short-term and, more importantly, long-term user behavior and a sustainable digital transformation of the healthcare system.