Zainab Ali Jaff
Business and Management Department,
Faculty of Administrative Sciences and Economics
Tishk International University, Erbil, Kurdistan Region/Iraq
Email: [email protected]
DOI: 10.23918/ICABEP2022p27
Abstract
The virtual healthcare trend is on its rapid growth in recent years since its evolution. The telemedicine market is expected to grow even more in the next few years, with an estimated investment in telehealth of 16 billion dollars by 2024. The rise of social media coupled with the outbreak of Covid-19 has further accelerated the growth of the telemedicine industry and its utilization and deployment. Different social networking platforms, media sharing pages, virtual reality, blogs, wikis, etc. are available for the healthcare professional that can be used for improving professional network and education, patient care, patient awareness and education and on a wider scope for public health programs. On the other hand, during the pandemic primary care and clinics were forced to shut their doors to physical appointments, the virtual healthcare was the alternative means of communication between patients and healthcare professionals. Hence, analyzing the socioeconomic characteristics of virtual healthcare users becomes a necessity in order to understand the potential socioeconomic gaps and then enhance the adoption of virtual healthcare services. The aim of this empirical study is to evaluate the current status of telemedicine adoption in the KRI and measure the correlation of virtual healthcare services use with the socioeconomic determinants. A survey questionnaire will be deployed among the private healthcare providers in the KRI to measure their level of acceptance and examine the socioeconomic factors affecting the use of telemedicine services among healthcare stakeholders. The data will be analyzed in two ways. A descriptive statistic is undertaken to report the level of telemedicine use and its determinant socioeconomic factors. A principal components analysis will be used to compress a dataset onto a lower dimension of the variables to capture the effect of level of use, preserved ease of use, level of usefulness, personality factors, and external factors. Finally, a multinomial logit regression analysis will be conducted to evaluate the individual effects of the latent variables on the level of telemedicine use.
Keywords: Socioeconomic determinants, virtual healthcare adoption, the KRI
ICABEP2022
4th International Conference on Accounting, Business, Economics and Politics
Organized by
Tishk International University, College of Administration and Economics, Salahaddin University-Erbil, and
University of Szczecin, Poland.
