What Drives the Adoption of Mobile Health Applications?

The provision of safe and affordable health care to citizens has become one of the most challenging tasks for modern countries. Health care costs currently grow faster than GDPs and will in the long run consume an unsustainable portion of developed nation’s wealth. Recent developments in mobile technology fuelled the adoption of mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets. Consequently, “apps”, small programs for these devices, experienced a boom and became a real trend. These small programs opened various new possibilities for companies and governments to communicate with their users. Now, people are able to receive, process and send information virtually anytime, anywhere. This development has the potential to change health care and the way it is delivered: Health applications are the programs for mobile devices called, which can fulfil various purposes, such as remote health monitoring. Due to the novelty of this technology, little research has been done in this field. There is a heated debate on what drives the adoption of mobile apps. Is it driven by consumer trust on the brand behind the launch? Which role does the consistency between the mother brand and the application focus play? Does a marketing campaign boost adoption? How important are user and expert reviews for the success of an app? This thesis aims to contribute to the discussion, by researching the drivers of adoption of mobile health application and further exploring consumers’ willingness to pay for such services. A 2x2x2x2 survey experiment was performed to examine the roles of consumer trust, brand consistency, marketing exposure, user feedback and doctor recommendations on the intention to use and willingness to pay for mobile health applications. The results suggest, that trust plays an important role in the adoption process and acts as a mediator. User feedback and doctor recommendations have positive influence on intention to use and willingness to pay. Brand consistency, on the other hand, only has a positive effect on the intentions to use. Surprisingly, marketing exposure has a negative effect on the mediator and consequently on the dependent variables. These finding, however, might be caused by research design and will be discussed in more detail.