Methodological implications of research on technology use by healthcare professionals: A short introduction to multidimensional scaling

Abstract

Healthcare professionals currently face different challenges in an ongoing reconstruction of care. Digitization and the use of healthcare-related technologies promise both an improvement in quality of care and an increase of treatment efficacy. Especially telemedicine systems seem to be capable to overcome current spatial and temporal limitations of care. As telemedicine appears to be a non-uniform term describing a variety of technological characteristics, the explanatory power of entrenched models for technology use varies across different contexts of use. To explore important contextual factors in the field of healthcare technology research and to enrich the methodological diversity in Information Systems research, this paper provides a short introduction to Multidimensional Scaling. Being able to visualize underlying dimensions of subjective perceptions, Multidimensional Scaling shows complementary applicability and use with regard to elaborated methods and a high integrability into holistic research strategies.