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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has engendered many hospitals in China to confront the crisis by utilizing information and communication technologies that create opportunities for patients to access online healthcare information resources. This is essential as person-to-person meeting is discouraged in order to curtail the spread of the virus. These modern online application and information dissemination systems, which are constituted in the company’s website, social media and live streaming platforms, and short videos aim to cater to the diversified demands of the patients, who want nothing but a regular and efficient assessment of their physical health condition, and in so doing improve their quality of life. This present study, hence, intends to investigate the influences of hospitals’ online healthcare information services such as information quality, service quality, and information channel toward elderly patients’ online health information intention through perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and information adoption intention. This is to help increase the utilization rates of these resources.
Thus far, only very few studies about online environment in Chinese hospitals have been conducted. In fact, the researcher deemed that this present study is just one of those few that ventured into exploring the online capacities of hospitals in China and their impact on elderly care. Thus, the findings aim to contribute to the theory and practice of online healthcare system in hospitals at the same time test the hypotheses suggested by the previous studies but by examining only the indirect and total effects among the studied variables not their direct effects.