An Investigation of Pharmacists' Acceptance of NHI-PharmaCloud in Taiwan

Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) is one of the most successful insurance programs in the world. The National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) established the NHI-PharmaCloud as a platform to reduce medication duplication and other medication errors among the NHI-contracted facilities. The NHI-PharmaCloud can help pharmacists access patient medication information from the preceding 3months to improve drug safety. The use of NHI-PharmaCloud can improve the quality of healthcare, but improvements cannot occur if pharmacists are unwilling to use the platform. Therefore, the main objective of our study is to investigate the factors affecting pharmacists' adoption of the NHI-PharmaCloud. This study develops a research model using theories of technology adoption, self-efficacy, and perceived risk and uses randomly distributed survey questionnaires to collect data from local pharmacists. The results show that self-efficacy, perceived usefulness, and perceived psychological risk are 3 critical factors that could affect pharmacists' willingness to use the NHI-PharmaCloud. The research results may also help NHIA to effectively promote the usage of the NHI-PharmaCloud in Taiwan. In addition, governments in other countries may refer to the results of this study when implementing their own PharmaCloud-type systems to improve drug safety.