The grouping and prioritizing of driving forces for ICT adoption by medical practitioners: do these differ between rural and urban GPs in Australia?

Increasing use of ICT technologies in medical practices has led to a number of studies examining their use in rural as well as urban settings. The purpose of this study is to examine how GPs in rural and urban practice group and prioritise the driving forces for ICT adoption. Correlation and factor analysis was performed on the data sets (198 GPs, 122 Rural - 76 urban) obtained by means of a survey questionnaire. Not only do the results show that the drivers can be 'simplified' from 16 to 2 or 3, but they also show that there are differences both in the grouping and priorities placed on certain drivers between rural and urban GPs. Whereas rural GPs consider that there are 3 distinct underlying reasons for ICT adoption (medical/business efficiency, external pressure, enhanced communication), urban GPs couple external pressure with enhanced communications as a single driver for ICT adoption.