UNDERSTANDING THE DRIVERS AND CONSEQUENCES OF INTERACTIVE INNOVATION ADOPTION IN HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Providing technologies and services to enable collaboration and communication is a vital concern for information scientists and organizational leaders supporting communities of professionals in research-intensive health care environments. Innovative information practices and technologies—which may include mobile and social-media based technologies, new electronic records systems, new data management practices, and new communication procedures—are developed and introduced, often at considerable cost, with the goal of supporting and enhancing information sharing. However, at times these innovations fail to be adopted by their intended user communities, or adoption leads to unforeseen negative consequences for information sharing within the social environment. The health care sector in particular, while often characterized as generally innovative, has at times been slow to adopt new information innovations. This is a seeming paradox for innovation adoption studies, in which innovativeness is typically treated as synonymous with being among the first to adopt an innovation. This research was conducted in order to better understand the factors that influence or impede interactive innovation adoption in research-intensive health care environments. A four quadrant model, the Pollock Model of Interactive Innovation Adoption (PMIIA) was created and tested in a study of innovation adoption among physicians in training at an academic medical center in the southern United States. Factors from all four quadrants of the model were found to be related to either adoption decisions or perceptions of innovations. Additionally, both personal and professional values were found to play a role in participants' adoption and use of the innovations.