Web Healthcare Applications in Poland: Trends, Standards, Barriers and Possibilities of Implementation and Usage of E-Health Systems

Introduction

There is a Virgil quote which says: “The greatest wealth is health”, indicating the importance of health to most if not all people. As a result most of us since the dawn of time look for information about healthy lifestyle, preventive healthcare and especially pieces of information connected with diseases and treatment. Nowadays, the majority of those interested in seeking information for healthcare is taking advantage of up-to-date technologies and hence are using the Internet. Although the available healthcare information has been radically increased over the years, the abundance of information impose additional difficulties when seeking trusty and reliable web-based resources as well as the information found in the internet should be evaluated since it could be dangerous. On the other hand, medical service providers see potential opportunities and try to apply modern technologies to enhance the healthcare services and reduce the associated costs. E-health for example provides interesting opportunities relating the modern information technologies with doctors’ knowledge. E-health applications can include specialized medical portals, internet expert systems for disease diagnose based on symptoms, doctors’ Internet advice, online (video) consultation with doctors, etc. (Furmankiewicz, Sołtysik-Piorunkiewicz, & Ziuziański, 2014; Ziuziański, Furmankiewicz, & Sołtysik-Piorunkiewicz, 2014). Multimedia and Web technologies can help in the specific healthcare applications to grow up the impact of their usability (Sołtysik-Piorunkiewicz, 2009, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015a, 2015b) and can change the favorable circumstances of user behavioral intention. The favorable circumstance is one of the dimensions of the Venkatesh unified user acceptance of information technology model (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis G., & Davis F.D, 2003). This model is presented in Figure 1. Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) was proposed by American professor K. Viswanath (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis G., & Davis F.D, 2003) and his collaborators at University of Maryland. UTAUT is based on occurrence four factors influencing on intention using given technology: facilitating conditions, social influence, effort expectancy, and performance expectancy.

Figure 1.

UTAUT model

Source: own study based on: V. Venkatesh, M.G. Morris, G.B. Davis and F.D. Davis, User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view, „MIS Quarterly” 2003, nr 27, pp. 425–478.