Determinants of ICT usage for healthcare among people with disabilities: The moderating role of technological and behavioural constraints.

Abstract

Existing studies have demonstrated that people with disabilities (PwD) face a range of technological and behavioural barriers to successful adoption of information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled health services. However, there has been little examination and no scholarly consensus on the relative impact of each factor. This study investigates the determinants of ICT usage for health care among PwD. Using national-level disability survey data in Australia, several multivariate hierarchical regression models are deployed to predict the relationship between ICT-enabled health service adoption and the explanatory variables. In addition, several measures of the overall goodness-of-fit are estimated for each model. The results indicate that age, gender, income, level of education, language proficiency and geographical remoteness are significant predictors of ICT-enabled health care usage among PwD. It is also found that technological constraints have a stronger moderating effect than behavioural factors. This provides valuable insight for policymakers and private organisations on which approaches and interventions are most likely to narrow the digital disability divide.