Correspondence: Marie-Louise Jung, Lulea University of Technology, Lulu-Beck-Weg 12, Gauting, 82131, Germany. E-mail: Marie-Louise.Jung@juj.de

¹holds a PhD in e-commerce from Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.

²is a marketing professor at Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA where he is the Clifford F. Youse Chair of Marketing.

Received 14 July 2009; Revised 14 July 2009.

Abstract

Ageing populations and runaway health costs are challenging governments and tax payers across the developed world. E-health has been trumpeted as a potential saviour. Yet delivery has been patchy, consumer reaction mixed and adoption slow: the jury is still very much out on e-health. Part of the problem may be that research has tended to focus on the technology rather than the user and on the product rather than the service. Moreover, the exploratory studies on use have lacked theoretical grounding so that we know that things are not working – we just do not know why. This is where this research contributes. In this article we review the potential benefits and pitfalls of e-health, and drawing on the technological acceptance literature to develop a theory-based model of e-health acceptance. Our model is a step towards providing the answer to the question of why e-health fails and how it can be made to work.