Adoption of wireless handheld technology: a case of Queensland healthcare

Abstract

[Abstract]: Wireless technology is considered to a component of emerging technologies due to its relative newness in business. The mobility offered by this technology has influenced the introduction of this technology in healthcare, especially for nursing profession as nurses are always moving between patients and wards. The main advantage provided by this technology is collection of patient data at point of care, to manage patient schedules and to manage pharmaceutical information as these are the tasks performed by nurses in their workflow. Further, the technology offers flexibility and mobility to nursing staff to enable them to access data while they are moving between wards and patients. Despite many comments, it appears that user opinions on the adoption of technology specific to nursing are not prevalently available as current studies are focused on the technical aspects. This study, through a grant won from the Queensland Nursing Council in 2004, conducted a set of 30 interviews with nursing staffs to identify adoption factors. A qualitative technique, namely interviews, was used for data collection purposes and the adoption factors were identified using an NVivo analysis. The outcome of the interviews is reported in this paper.