Identification of critical success factors in adoption of health IT services from older people's perspective

Mobile health (mHealth) applications have the potential to improve healthcare services, lessen the burden on hospitals, and enhance the experience of quality of life. Mobile health applications are designed without considering the patient characteristics of their population. There are some issues in the adoption of mHealth applications among older people, such as problems in login, difficulty in navigation, inappropriate guidance, cumbersome data updation, and privacy issues. In this article, critical success factors are identified for the adoption of health-related IT services in older people. For understanding end-user barriers, it is necessary to understand the user’s context and demographic information. A usability questionnaire was devised to get information about users, their demographics, and critical success factors for the adoption of mobile health applications. The questionnaire has responses in form of ordinal data, so nonparametric statistical tests are performed and the spearman correlation coefficient (r) is calculated to understand the role of each critical success factor in task performance. This research has evaluated nine success factors and their impact on elder people in the usage of diabetic health applications. Only four critical success factors were found strongly correlated with task performance i.e., information flow, ease of data entry, regular guidance, and usefulness. The research also identified that poor usability is a primary reason for discontinuing the use of mHealth applications among older people.