Factors Influencing Telemedicine Adoption Among Health Care Professionals: Qualitative Interview Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Telemedicine is transforming health care by enabling remote diagnosis, consultation, and treatment. Despite rapid adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine uptake among health care professionals (HCPs) remains inconsistent due to perceived risks and lack of tailored policies. Existing studies focus on patient perspectives or general adoption factors, neglecting the complex interplay of contextual variables and trust constructs influencing HCPs' telemedicine adoption. This gap highlights the need for a framework integrating risks, benefits, and trust in telemedicine adoption, while addressing health care's unique dynamics. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to adapt and extend the extended valence framework (EVF) to telemedicine, deconstructing factors driving adoption from an HCP perspective. Specifically, it investigated the nuanced roles of perceived risks, benefits, and trust referents (eg, technology, treatment, technology provider, and patient) in shaping behavioral intentions, while integrating contextual factors. METHODS: We used a qualitative research design involving semistructured interviews with 14 HCPs experienced in offering video consultations. The interview data were analyzed with deductive and inductive coding based on the EVF. Two coders conducted the coding process independently, achieving an intercoder reliability of 86.14%. The qualitative content analysis aimed to uncover the nuanced perspectives of HCPs, identifying key risk and benefit dimensions and trust referents relevant to telemedicine adoption. RESULTS: The study reveals the complex considerations HCPs have when adopting telemedicine. Perceived risks were multidimensional, including performance risks such as treatment limitations (mentioned by 7/14, 50% of the participants) and reliance on technical proficiency of patients (5/14, 36%), privacy risks related to data security (10/14, 71%), and time and financial risks associated with training (7/14, 50%) and equipment costs (4/14, 29%). Perceived benefits encompassed convenience through reduced travel time (5/14, 36%), improved care quality due to higher accessibility (8/14, 57%), and operational efficiency (7/14, 50%). Trust referents played a pivotal role; trust in technology was linked to functionality (6/14, 43%) and reliability (5/14, 36%), while trust in treatment depended on effective collaboration (9/14, 64%). Transparency emerged as a critical antecedent of trust across different referents, comprising disclosure, clarity, and accuracy. In addition, the study highlighted the importance of context-specific variables such as symptom characteristics (10/14, 71%) and prior professional experience with telemedicine (11/14, 79%). CONCLUSIONS: This study expands the EVF for telemedicine, providing a framework integrating multidimensional risks, benefits, trust, and contextual factors. It advances theory by decomposing trust referents and transparency into actionable subdimensions and emphasizing context-specific variables. Practically, the findings guide stakeholders: policy makers should prioritize transparent regulations and data security, health care organizations should provide training and support for HCPs, and technology developers must design telemedicine solutions aligning with trust and usability needs. This understanding equips health care to address barriers, optimize adoption, and leverage telemedicine's potential for sustainable clinical integration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".