英文摘要 |
Recently, advances in information and communication technology as well as biomedical technology have introduced numerous ways of telemedicine technology to enhance or expand the services and care provided to patients, that is, telehealth. However, most telehealth studies focused only on the development of technology rather than on comprehensive evaluation of patients' (or customers') perception about service processes. Therefore, it's very difficult to understand the elderly population's actual needs and problems, limiting the clinical implementation of the findings and presenting barriers to knowledge development. Besides, the adoption of the telehealth systems is an integrated technical-social-managing process. There is a paucity of scale research that integrates these three dimensions. In addition, most studies have been limited in special scope or small sample size. This article reviews important literatures on telemedicine and telehealth, discusses deeply the issue of evaluating the effectiveness of such technology. The three key dimensions and ten sub-indictors have been identified. That is, technical dimension, including system quality; social psychological dimension, including functional risk, privacy risk, institutional trust and patient trust; and managing dimension, including service quality, cost benefit, satisfaction, use intention, and influence on health. The 262 elderly samples of this study were collected by face to face interviewed from rural community located in central Taiwan. The preliminary Chinese version of multi-dimensional telehealth scale was validated by psychometric analyses to test the reliability and validity, and reduced the number of scale items from 35 to 34. Using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis methods, the ten factors were extracted that was consistent with proposed ten dimensions and explained 82.625% of the variance. The final Chinese version of multi-dimensional telehealth scale demonstrated excellent reliability and validity, and it provided available and applicable measuring tool to evaluate the effectiveness of telehealth. Through this article, we hope to stimulate deeper exploration and insight of academic theory and clinical practice to help shape and create a better vision of aging in place. |