An empirical study of opinion leader effects on mobile information technology adoption in healthcare

Given the increasing number of applications but slow adoption of IT, including mobile IT, in healthcare, it is important to develop a better understanding of the contextual factors that motivate IT adoption by physicians. Although studies have shown that age or gender may affect physicians' IT adoption, those factors cannot be controlled when deploying a new IT. Therefore, the current research examines empirical evidence of a contextual factor, opinion leader effects, on IT adoption in healthcare that can be influenced by organizational policies. Using a unique panel dataset of physicians' usage of a mobile clinical IT from a community hospital, we observe a significant result that physicians under the influence of opinion leaders are three times more likely to adopt the IT than otherwise. This finding suggests that incentivizing a small proportion of opinion leaders to adopt a new IT has the potential to motivate wider adoption across the organization.