Burgess, Stephen, Darbyshire, Paul, Sellitto, Carmine, Tatnall, Arthur and Wenn, Andrew (2003) A Classification System for Tracking the Adoption of it by GPs in Rural Australia. In: Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2003 2nd ed. Isaías, Pedro and Karmakar, Nitya, eds. International Association for Development of the Information Society, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 93-99.

Abstract

This paper proposes an investigation of sociotechnical factors affecting the adoption of information technology (IT) by General Practitioners (GPs), for the purposes of the development of a classification system to track their adoption of information technology. GPs have not been rapid adopters of IT. A number of studies have listed general sociotechnical reasons for adoption or non-adoption of IT by GPs, but they fail to provide a means of classifying individual GPs according to these factors. The authors argue that GPs exhibit the many of the traits of small business owners in relation to the use of IT and that many of the insights already gathered about the use of IT by small businesses can be applied to GPs. Using previously identified IT sociotechnical adoption factors, a classification system is developed allowing GPs to be individually classified according to their adoption level. Innovation translation is introduced as the technique preferred to conduct this study. Such a system will allow the adoption of IT by GPs to be tracked and lessons learned from the behaviour of ‘successful’ IT adopters to be applied to other GPs. An upcoming research project, set to apply the classification system, is described.

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