Electronic patient-reported outcome measures (e-PROMs) have been introduced to improve the collection of patient feedback and to facilitate data linkage with research databases. However, before implementing e-PROMs, it is important to understand patient’s feelings about and acceptance of these technologies. Until today, there has been no adequate questionnaire to understand patient acceptance of e-PROMs. So, this study aimed to study patient acceptance of e-PROMs through developing and validating a new questionnaire based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and additional factors including computer anxiety and patient characteristic factors.
Not only did this study apply a quantitative method to understand the factors behind patient acceptance, the development and the psychometric testing of the new questionnaire was conducted using a variety of methodological approaches. This includes: (1) developing the initial version of the questionnaire based on the available literature, (2) an expert panel review (n=5) and cognitive interviews (n=10) to measure face and content validity, and (3) conducting field-testing (n=231) to measure construct validity and internal consistency reliability. The field-testing included testing the conceptual model with cancer survivors at an outpatient oncology clinic in Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Based on these study findings, the developed questionnaire shows good validity and reliability. Moreover, the conceptual model results show that patient attitudes (a TPB construct), computer anxiety and gender were significantly (P<0.05) associated with behavioural intention to use e-PROMs. The most influential factor is patients’ attitude to computers, followed by computer anxiety then male gender. Overall, these model constructs explained around 87% of the variance in acceptance. The findings of this study strongly suggest that clinicians need to encourage their male patients to use e-PROMs and help them to reduce their computer anxiety.
