Thesis (MSc) - Cyprus International University. Institute of Graduate Studies and Research Healthcare Organizations Management Department

Includes bibliography (sheets 48-57)

ABSTRACT
The growth in the application of information and technology in health services has caused a tremendous upgrade in the practice of health service delivery. Described as `telemedicine`, the adoption of technology in health services has also improved efficiency in terms of cost-effectiveness, time-saving, and error avoidance. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the attitude towards endorsing and embracing the use of telemedicine for health services. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the implementation and acceptance of telemedicine .This thesis utilized different factors like computer efficacy, information quality, performance expectancy, response expectancy, system quality etc. to measure the attitude of patients towards telemedicine adoption. This study also considered that for those who would be eligible to take part in the survey, should have a knowledge of the websites, or mobile applications. This inclusion parameter of respondents will help is filtering actual respondents who are familiar with the discourse of telemedicine, and the number of questionnaires distributed was 394. The DeLone and McLean and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model of information system were used in this study to investigate the research aim. We found that information quality has a positive impact on the attitudes of patients towards telemedicine health service (THS). Recent technology developments, as well as the resulting increase in performance prices, have aided the growth of telemedicine tremendously. We also found that system quality has a negative influence on the attitudes of patients towards accepting telemedicine health system. Healthcare organizations face a significant issue in determining the quality of telemedicine systems and as a result, these types of studies or centers typically have a major influence on the acceptability, performance, sustainability, and long-term viability of the services they provide. We thesis only considered Zimbabwe, which gives a direction for future studies to embark on a more thorough study on the issue of telemedicine adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also, this thesis recommends that the issue of ethics, and legal issues regarding the data of patients using telemedicine should also be studied in future research of telemedicine in Africa.