What They Gain Depends on What They Do: An Exploratory Empirical Research on Effective Use of Mobile Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Mobile healthcare application receives widespread attention, although it has advanced technology and user-friendly design, when users don’t use it effectively, it seems worthless. Research mainly focus on technology improvement. But how to improve user behavior to match the technology is another essential factor for facilitating effective use from managerial perspective. We introduced the task technology fit theory to explain the mechanism when user using the applications. We added perceived e-health literacy as moderator variable, considering the user characteristic and medical environment. The data was collected from student samples of two schools (medical and non-medical related universities), totally 178 valid samples. Our research indicates adaptation and learning behavior have significantly positive impact on the efficiency use and effectiveness use. The perceived e-health literacy only has significant moderator effect on learning behavior. Our study provides practical implications for both software providers and users to achieve effective use of mobile healthcare applications.