Abstract

Nowadays, the booming of Mobile Healthcare Applications (MHAs) provides several new kinds of health services and methods of information transmission. However, it is a salient challenge for MHA vendors to attract users to adopt software continuously. Though users’ perceived e-health literacy is recognized as a critical factor in some recent studies, its influence was still not clear. This paper has investigated how the users’ perceived e-health literacy (PEHL) affects their continuance intention when adopting mobile healthcare applications based on elaboration likelihood model (ELM). We distributed questionnaires by Wechat (similar to Whatsapp) in China, where hundreds of MHAs can be downloaded, and 273 valid samples were collected. Result shows that ELM works well in this model with 6 of the 8 hypotheses are supported. The moderate effect of PEHL is largely significant on peripheral route but not significant on central route. The most interesting finding is that the relationship between PEHL and users’ satisfaction in continuance adoption is positive. Possible reasons are discussed such as, there could exist a moderator on this relationship. Limitations, future researches and implications for theory and practice are also given. The paper should include an abstract. The abstract should be understandable by the general reader outside the context of the study. The abstract should be formatted like this paragraph, and may be up to 200 words in length.

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