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

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.