Physician adoption of personal digital assistants (PDA): testing its determinants within a structural equation model

Research has begun to explore the determinants of personal digital assistant (PDA) adoption in health care. Much of this research has, however, been inconsistent in its treatment of key constructs and its methodological approaches. The current study takes a stricter approach and tracks the pre- and postadoption beliefs of physicians provided with an actual PDA within a single health care facility in the United States. Results show that age, position in hospital, beliefs about health IT, and cluster ownership are significant, direct predictors of the physician's preadoption beliefs about PDAs. Contrary to prior research findings, both ease of use and usefulness perceptions significantly influenced the physician's intent to adopt PDAs. More important, results show that physicians focus on a broader range of PDA factors during preadoption assessment of the technology, while actual use is based solely on the PDA's ease of use. Moreover, the preadoption usefulness perceptions do not influence postadoption usefulness. Hence, the cognitive and affective determinants of intent to use are seemingly different from those used to evaluate PDA use.