Abstract & Overview
The aim of this study was to explore the influence of environmental factors namely the service need andfacilitating conditions on the acceptance of teleconsultation technology in order to enrich theunderstanding of the teleconsultation technology acceptance behaviour among health care providers inhealth facilities. The study was conducted based on the concurrent triangulation design involvingqualitative and quantitative study methods. These entailed interviews with key informants andquestionnaires survey of health care providers who worked in the participating hospitals inMalaysia. Thematic analysis involving iterative coding was conducted on qualitative data. Scalereliability test and hypothesis testing procedures were performed on quantitative data. Subsequently, bothdata were merged, confirmed and interpreted. The results exhibited that the quantitative results werefairly consistent with the qualitative findings. Based on the responses from 20 key informants, the actualneeds for the technology and subsistence of facilitating conditions were found to be important inexplaining the way teleconsultation was utilized. Concurrently, based on the survey engaging 72 healthcare providers, the teleconsultation usage was statistically proven to be strongly associated with theenvironmental factors. The prominent insight gained from this study was that the teleconsultationacceptance was perceptibly driven by the health care environment factors. The study demonstrated theimportance of actionable factors that have existed in telemedicine diffusion that constituted a significantrole in the acceptance of the technology. In respect to future theoretical work, the findings can beconsidered to conceptualize a further comprehensive teleconsultation acceptance model.