Adoption and use of a mobile system at home care

The popularity of mobile applications is increasing in all sectors of care. Home care can benefit from electronic health record-based applications particularly, due to the distance of the patients´ home and care facilities. Multiple activities which were originally performed at the office with personal computers can now be performed at the presence of the patient. Mobile systems increase quality of care and help organizations to optimize their work flow. However, the adoption of technologies amongst care professionals can be poor. Implementing new technologies in care can be diffi-cult as professionals have different background skills in using mobile devices and the fear of technology can be a big barrier for some of the homecare nurses. There can also be problems with the device, web-connections and the application. The aim of this study was to find which factors have influence on adoption and use of a mobile system used at home care in the city of Nokia in order to further intensify the utilization of the mobile system and development of the application in collaboration with the service provider. This research was a case study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to 12 home care nurses to gain information about adoption and use of the system. Data was analysed by thematic content analysis. Three contextual inquiries took place and a task analysis was performed to identify phases of a mobile assisted home visit and phase-sensitive issues on using the system. Perceptions of adoption and use of a home care mobile system are diverse. Only 25% of nurses use the system at every home visit. Some benefits of using the system are seen, such as possibility to read patient data during home visits. However, all 12 nurses indicated versatile problems on use, such as heavy weight of the device, lack of critical functions and constant malfunctioning of the system leading to a lack of trustworthiness towards the system. In order to intensify the use of a mobile system at home care, multiple improvements to the system are required. This research enabled constructing an implementation plan based on a requirements analysis for service provider and recommendations for organizations and nurses using home care mobile systems. The requirements analysis consists of three major groups of requirements: device selection, application development and development of integrations between the mobile system and main patient information database. This thesis was produced in collaboration with EU Master Care &Technology cohort 2015-2017