【Topic】Consumers’ Willingness to Use Mobile Heath (mHealth) : An Integrated Consumer-Provider Innovativeness and Health Risk Explanation

【Speaker】Arun Rai, Professor of Georgia State University

【Time】May 29th, Wednesday, 10:00-12:00

【Venue】Room 418, Shunde Building, Tsinghua SEM 

【Language 】English

【Organizer】Department of Management Science and Engineering

【Abstract】A fast-expanding set of innovative healthcare services can be delivered on consumers’ mobile devices. These mobile health (mHealth) services offer the potential to transform traditional in-person doctor-patient interactions and to increase accessibility, reduce costs, and increase quality of healthcare services. Yet, there is limited understanding of the factors that impact consumers’ willingness to use mHealth—a distinct class of innovation involving mobile technologies, consumers’ health, and local sourcing. Identifying the key patient-physician interaction tasks and the technological features that support these tasks, we define willingness to use mHealth in a rich comprehensive way. Drawing on theories of individual innovativeness, health needs fulfillment, and regional innovation clusters, we hypothesize consumers’ willingness to use IT-enabled service channels as determined individually and interactively by: (i) consumers’ innovativeness toward mobile services, (ii) health vulnerability, and (iii) local healthcare providers’ health information technology (HIT) innovativeness. We developed a cross-sectional consumer-level survey and augmented the final survey dataset with secondary regional health and healthcare provider data (at the level of the county in the U.S.) from multiple sources. The final, aggregated dataset contains responses from 1,045 nationally representative U.S. residents, from 592 distinct U.S. counties. We find that willingness to use mHealth is greater for consumers who are more innovative toward mobile services, who live in counties with higher level of provider HIT innovativeness, and who feel more vulnerable to chronic diseases. We also find that the positive relationship between consumer mobile service innovativeness and willingness to use mHealth is stronger for consumers who feel more vulnerable to chronic diseases. These findings expand our theoretical understanding of consumers’ willingness to use mHealth and, more generally, IT-enabled service channels for locally sourced and in-person delivered services.  Practically, these findings suggest that mHealth usage preferences are likely to be dependent not only on the mobile services innovativeness and health characteristics of the individual, but also on the HIT innovativeness of local providers of healthcare services.

【Bio】Arun Rai is Regents’ Professor and Harkins Chair in Information Systems at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He has also held visiting appointments at universities in Germany, France, Hong Kong, and Australia.  Arun’s expertise is in IT-enabled innovation and business value, and IT-enabled governance of interorganizational relationships. He co-founded the Robinson College of Business’ Center for Process Innovation, an interdisciplinary research center that also promotes industry-university partnerships on research. He was appointed Regents’ Professor in 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia for outstanding contributions in research, teaching and service, and has received J. Mack Robinson College of Business Faculty Recognition Awards for both Outstanding Teaching and Distinguished Contributions in Research. He was named a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2010 for outstanding contributions in research, teaching and service to the Information Systems discipline.

Arun has published over 85 articles in leading scholarly journals in Information Systems (e.g., Management Science, MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research), Operations Management (e.g., Journal of Operations Management ), and Healthcare (e.g., Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association ), as well as in leading practitioner journals (e.g., Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer and MIS Quarterly Executive). He was ranked 6th for publications in the top two Information Systems journals (i.e., MISQ and ISR) in the last decade (2000-2010). He guest edited the September 2007 Special Issue of Information Systems Research on the Digitally Enabled Extended Enterprise. He serves, or has served, as Senior Editor for Information Systems Research and Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Guest Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly, and Associate Editor for several journals (e.g., Journal of Management Information Systems, Management Science, Decision Sciences, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly and Journal of the Association for Information Systems ).

Arun has applied an engaged scholarship model of industry-university partnerships to address scientific problems of practical importance and has collaborated on research projects with major corporations (e.g., Apollo Hospitals, China Mobile, Daimler-Chrysler, Emory Healthcare, Gartner, Georgia-Pacific, IBM, Intel, SAP, SunTrust, UPS). His research has also been sponsored by thought leadership forums of major corporations, such as IBM and SAP, and by multiple government agencies. He has chaired 24 doctoral dissertations and has served on over 30 other dissertation committees.  Arun has taught in several degree- and non-degree executive education programs, and has developed extremely successful customized executive education programs for major corporations (e.g., the Global Supply Chain Solutions Program for United Parcel Service's senior- and middle management when the company was transforming from a transportation provider to a supply chain solutions provider).

Arun's current research examines (a) the coevolution of IT and corporate/business strategy, (b) IT-enabled governance of inter-firm relationships and supply chains, (c) IT-enabled innovation and co-creation of value, and (d) a series of research methodology and theory development issues. His studies span key industries (e.g., healthcare, IT and other hi-tech, logistics and supply chains, electric utilities), units of analyses (e.g., decisions, individuals, teams, firms, and inter-firm relationships), research methods (e.g., archival and survey data, quantitative and qualitative methods), and theoretical perspectives (e.g., psychological, economic, sociological, and organizational).