Patients' Acceptance and Resistance toward the Health Cloud: an Integration of Technology Acceptance and Status Quo Bias Perspectives

The latest technological trends such as health cloud provide a strong infrastructure and offer a true enabler for healthcare services over the Internet. Despite its great potential, there are gaps in our understanding of how users evaluate change related to the health cloud and decide to resist it. According to the technology acceptance and status quo bias perspectives, this study develops an integrated model to explain patients’ intention to use and resistance to health cloud services. A field survey was conducted in Taiwan to collect data from patients. The structural equation model was used to examine the data. The results showed that patient resistance to use was caused by inertia, perceived value, and transition costs. Perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) have positive and direct effects on behavioral intention to use, and PEOU appears to have a positive direct effect on PU. The results also indicated that the relationship between intention to use and resistance to use had a significant negative effect. Our study illustrates the importance of incorporating user resistance in technology acceptance studies in general and health technology usage studies in particular, grounds for a resistance model of resistance that can serve as the starting point for future research in this relatively unexplored yet potentially fertile area of research.