Understanding the determinants of adoption and intention to recommend...

Background: Physician Rating Websites (PRWs) have become more popular as health-specific digital communication medium in recent years (Bidmon et al., 2020). Although a certain usage trend can be seen in this context (e.g., Patel et al. 2018), adoption of PRW usage has been scarcely investigated so far. One factor that could have an impact in this regard are recommendations. In the realm of mobile payment, Oliveira and others (2016) have shown that the influencing factors of the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) are suitable, amongst others, to explain adoption and intention to recommend the technology. So far, however, the UTAUT2 has never been applied to the realm of PRWs. Thus, the present study develops an influencing chain of intention to adopt and intention to recommend PRWs, based on selected UTAUT2 factors.

Method: The authors investigate the influence of facilitating conditions (FACC), hedonic motivation (HEDM), HABIT and social influence (SOCIAL), partially mediated by performance expectancy (PE), on behavioural intention to use (BI) and further to recommend (REC) PRWs. We report on an empirical study with 518 respondents, aged 15 – 68 years, applying an online survey by usage of the crowdsourcing platform Clickworker.com in Austria.  

Findings: The results derived from SEM have implications for theory and practice of communication strategies to incentivize PRW usage in the future and were discussed at the ICCH 2022.