| Providing primary health and specialty services to 3.4 million rural and highly rural veterans is a challenging task because of geographic barriers and the uneven distribution of rural healthcare providers. Although the Veterans Health Administration is hoping that technology such as telemedicine expands availability of specialties' access to rural veteran patients, the adoption of telemedicine has been slow.;The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that affect the telemedicine adoption rate by mental health professionals in Veterans Affairs. The research study involved psychiatrists, psychologist, primary care providers, clinical social workers, and other mental health professionals from VA medical centers and Community-Based Outpatient Clinics that have experience in telemedicine or are about to use telemedicine. Rogers' theory of diffusion of innovations provided a framework for analysis of the diffusion of innovation at a complex systems level taking into account the differences in users' rate of adoption.;The data for this analysis were collected using an online survey that remained open for 14 weeks and also from Veterans Affairs' electronic medical records for gathering the number of telemedicine encounters. The survey questions consisted of demographic, perceived characteristics, self-reported usage, and recommendation rate on the VA telemedicine. The survey contained 33 items to measure the perceptions of adopting telemedicine focused on variables that were found to affect the rate of adoption.;Correlations were used with adoption rate in order to discover whether using Clinical Video Tele-Heath increased the strength of agreement with the innovation attributes. As Moore and Benbasat predicted, voluntariness negatively correlated with adoption rate, and all other constructs were positively correlated except Image.;Pearson Correlation was conducted to examine potential multi-collinearity problems. None of the squared correlations was close to 0.80 to suggest a problem with multi-collinearity among the research variables (Hair, Anderson, Tatham, & Black, 1995). Therefore, there was no evidence of significant multi-collinearity among the research variables.;A stepwise multiple regression was conducted to evaluate eight perceived characteristics of innovation that were necessary to predict telemedicine adoption by VA mental health professionals at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The multiple correlation coefficient was .75 for trialability and compatibility, indicating approximately 55.5 percent of the variance of the adoption rate could be accounted for by trialability and compatibility. |
