Perceptions and Attitudes of Clinical Staff Towards Telemedicine Acceptance in Saudi Arabia

Regardless of promised benefits of telemedicine and its potential technical superiority, its adoption is often cited as a failed project and the lack of understanding potential user acceptance is one of the most pervasive reasons leading to this failure. More than 40% of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) adoption projects have failed for this reason and any ICT system would not be effective if its potential user were averse to utilising its adoption. To the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive scientific study has investigated the perceptions and attitudes of clinical staff towards telemedicine acceptance and use in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) healthcare system at a national level. The objective of this novel research lies in addressing this gap and is conducted in collaboration with the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH). The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is used to underpin this research and a questionnaire to support the objective of this research was conducted in KSA to collect data from a random sample of different categories of clinical staff in KSA. The survey of 1,523 returned questionnaires were selected and the findings of this study show that 67.6% of clinical staff on average expect or extremely expect high performance from using telemedicine in KSA. Also 62.6% of clinical staff agree or extremely agree that the use of telemedicine in KSA will be compatible with culture and society. On the other hand, 38.0% of clinical staff agree or extremely agree that the use of telemedicine will not be compatible with their job role. Furthermore 40.6% of participants stated that using telemedicine would not be easy for clinical staff and 37.4% of them indicated that it will waste a lot of time and require a lot of technical and non-clinical administrative time to complete.