| The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) regulated the privacy and security of patient information. Since HIPPA became a law, hospital operators have struggled to comply fully with its security and privacy provisions. The proximity-based biometric authentication (PBBA) technology evolved in last decade to help hospital operators make authentication friendlier for physicians while performing tasks at the hospital bedside, and promising to fulfill the HIPAA security and privacy provisions. However, the adoption of PBBA technology by hospital operators in the US has been slow. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) has not been able to explain the slow adoption of PBBA technology in the US. The purpose of this quantitative correlational cross-sectional survey study was to examine the factors influencing physicians' intention to adopt PBBA technologies in electronic medical records (EMR). This study conducted an online survey of US physicians and surgeons requiring a minimum of 196 responses, based on power analysis, but received 222 responses from an estimated total population of 740,312 surgeons and physicians in the US. This study drew a simple random sample of 15,760 physicians and surgeons from 284,068 available in the PhysicianDatabases.com convenience database. The results of this study, despite noted limitations, indicated the overall model was significant with adjusted R2 = .58, F(24, 194) = 10.709, p < .001. After controlling for experience, age and gender of the participants, the intention to adopt PBBA was predicted by a significant large positive effect of physical invasiveness on adoption intention with beta = 0.388, p < .001; a significant small positive effect of effort expectancy with beta = 0.193, p = .027; and a significant small positive effect of performance expectancy with beta = 0.164, p =. 041. Therefore, future research of PBBA adoption should explore the role of technology reliability of multi-modal PBBA technology, and infection control considerations of the technology to protect the patient's health. |
