FACTORS AFFECTING COMMUNITY PHARMACY CUSTOMER’S DECISION TO USE PERSONAL HEALTH RECORD VIA SMART PHONES

Abstract

Objectives: Community pharmacists should support patients to do self-care management. Self-care can help to prevent and control the severity of chronic diseases. Having a personal health record application on a smartphone can support individual to do self-care. At present, personal health record system has not been systematically implemented in Thailand yet. The aims of this research are to identify factors affecting customers’ decision to use a personal health record on a smartphone based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) theory and to investigate behavior of use. Methods: An observational and prospective study design was conducted from August, 2014 to February, 2016 at drug store in Bangkok. A total of 72 customers were selected. All received an explanation about PHR and were shown how to use the Microsoft Health Vault application. A prior-use self-administered questionnaire was conducted. Participants were asked to use the PHR for a month. During that period, the reminder and follow up system was conducted weekly by phone and email. Manual guides also provided. After one month, they were asked to do a post questionnaire and participated telephone interview. The data analysis was performed using logistic regression and descriptive statistical analysis. All study-related documents were approved by the Ethics Review Committee for Research Involving Human Research Subjects, Health Science Group, Chulalongkorn University. Results: The key factor significantly affecting intention to use PHR were social influence (p = 0.00) and performance expectancy (p = 0.03). The result showed that performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI), and voluntariness (Vol) together explained 60.0% of the variances for the intention to use PHR (INT). Among 26 used participants, weight control function was most used. The average frequency of use was about once a week. The major reasons of less use PHR included unnecessary for healthy people, manual data entry burden, little well known to public, and not get along with daily lifestyle. Conclusion: Social influence and performance expectancy were key factors influencing the intention to use PHR via a smartphone of customers based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) theory. To enhance the intention to use PHR, health professionals should motivate and help patients to use PHR by educating how to use, give feedbacks how to improve health from health data recorded in PHR. Public promotion and social advertisement should be done to make PHR use much well-known. These will make people acknowledge the importance and advantages of PHR. Besides, PHR application should be developed to be easy to use such as automatically data transferring, include features and functions based on end-user’s needs. These will encourage users to employ a PHR as a self-care tool to improve their health status.