Exploring the intention to use a clinical imaging portal for enhancing healthcare education

Clinical imaging plays an integral role in disease diagnosis and patient care. It is good for healthcare professionals such as nurses to acquire skills and knowledge in radiological examination requests and image interpretation, since this kind of role extension provides more personalized patient care and streamlines the service. This study described the development of a clinical imaging portal to facilitate independent learning in image interpretation and explored factors affecting intentions to use the portal based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), with the computer self-efficacy construct as an external variable. One hundred and twenty-eight nursing students participated in this survey study and the results indicated that the portal was perceived as easy to use, useful and satisfying. Structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that attitude toward using the portal exhibited the strongest total effect on behavioral intention to use, followed by perceived ease of use and computer self-efficacy. Although some TAM researchers have suggested that the inclusion of attitude is not meaningful, we argue that attitude should continue to be used in subsequent research. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.