Validation of a Short Questionnaire to Assess Healthcare Professionals’ Perceptions of Asynchronous Telemedicine Services: The Catalan Version of the Health Optimum Telemedicine Acceptance Questionnaire

Abstract

Telemedicine is both effective and able to provide efficient care at a lower cost. It also enjoys a high degree of acceptance among users. The Technology Acceptance Model proposed is based on the two main concepts of ease of use and perceived usefulness and is comprised of three dimensions: the individual context, the technological context and the implementation or organizational context. At present, no short, validated questionnaire exists in Catalonia to evaluate the acceptance of telemedicine services amongst healthcare professionals using a technology acceptance model. This article aims to statistically validate the Catalan version of the EU project Health Optimum telemedicine acceptance questionnaire. The study included the following phases: adaptation and translation of the questionnaire into Catalan and psychometric validation with construct (exploratory factor analysis), consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) and stability (test–retest) analysis. After deleting incomplete responses, calculations were made using 33 participants. The internal consistency measured with the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was good with an alpha coefficient of 0.84 (95%, CI: 0.79–0.84). The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.93 (95% CI: 0.852–0.964). The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test of sampling showed to be adequate (KMO = 0.818) and the Bartlett test of sphericity was significant (Chi-square 424.188; gl = 28; p < 0.001). The questionnaire had two dimensions which accounted for 61.2% of the total variance: quality and technical difficulties relating to telemedicine. The findings of this study suggest that the validated questionnaire has robust statistical features that make it a good predictive model of healthcare professional’s satisfaction with telemedicine programs.

Telemedicine Acceptance during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Empirical Example of Robust Consistent Partial Least Squares Path Modeling

“…In general, these studies indicate that technology acceptance models perform better than behavioral models when it comes to telemedicine acceptance [14,22,23]. The TPB and the TAM are the two most popular models to explain the use of systems [24][25][26] and, in particular, within the adoption of telemedicine systems, their utilization has been highlighted separately [27][28][29][30][31] or in a complementary way [32]. Previous ideas led us to choose TPB and TAM in the present study as a research framework.…”

The Perimenopausal Fatigue Self-Management Scale Is Suitable for Evaluating Perimenopausal Taiwanese Women’s Vulnerability to Fatigue Syndrome

“…In theory, the KMO value was used to examine the measure of sampling adequacy (MSA), which ranged between 0 and 1, and the value more closely reached 1, suggesting that the correlation of the variables was much higher, and these variables were more suitable for factor analysis [ 27 , 41 , 42 , 43 ]. The correlation coefficient between the variables was χ 2 = 503.45, df = 260, p < 0.001, suggesting that a significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity was found [ 44 , 45 ]. The principal factor analysis for the 25 items of the P-MFSMS was shown in RMSEA (root mean square error of approximation), and the result was 0.065.…”

Primary Care Professionals’ Acceptance of Medical Record-Based, Store and Forward Provider-to-Provider Telemedicine in Catalonia: Results of a Web-Based Survey

“…This is an observational cross-sectional study using the Catalan version of the Health Optimum questionnaire, a Technology Acceptance Model-based validated survey which aims to measure the degree of satisfaction with telemedicine services and describing the factors that can determine its future use [30]. The questionnaire, consisting of 8 short questions with 3 or 5 response options using a Likert scale, is based on the two main concepts of ease of use and comprises three dimensions of perceived usefulness: individual context, technological context and implementation or organizational context [31].…”

“…We are aware that the simplicity of the eight questions questionnaire might imply that the tool loses some capacity to capture specific insights. However, the questionnaire was specifically designed to be simple to use and was validated in a previously published study, showing a high reliability index [30].…”

“…Numerous questionnaires attempt to study the acceptance of healthcare professionals regarding telemedicine [27][28][29]. Among them is the validated Catalan version of the "Health Optimum Questionnaire" [30], inspired by the areas and simplicity of the technology acceptance model [31]. In this context, the objective of this study was to assess the acceptance of telemedicine services among primary care professionals in the Catalan central region using the aforementioned questionnaire, and to describe the factors which may determine the use of telemedicine services in the future.…”