Understanding Barriers and Facilitators in Clinicians’ Adoption of Digital Health Technologies.
- Shoshana Bloom
- May 1
- 5 min read
The digitisation of healthcare continues to accelerate with promises of delivering more personalised, efficient, and accessible services and the potential to transform clinical care. However, realising these benefits depends heavily on clinicians and how they perceive, adopt, recommend and integrate these technologies into their daily practice and care pathways. Despite growing investment and availability of innovation, the uptake of healthcare technologies by healthcare professionals is often inconsistent.
For this latest blog post, we’ve delved into the evidence base to understand the key barriers and enablers to the adoption of digital health technologies by healthcare professionals.
Legal and Regulatory Concerns
Clinicians often face uncertainties regarding the legal implications of using health technology. Concerns about data privacy, security, and compliance with data protection regulations can rightly or wrongly hinder adoption. Additionally, the lack of clear guidelines on liability in cases of technology failure or misdiagnosis may make some clinicians overly cautious.
Ethical Considerations
Ethical dilemmas, such as the need to ensure equitable access to healthcare technologies and addressing potential biases in algorithm-driven tools, are arguably important concerns. Clinicians may be wary of technologies that might inadvertently exacerbate health disparities or create unfair biases and differences in how patients are cared for and the treatments they receive.
Organisational Culture
Organisational culture plays a pivotal role in technology adoption. Resistance to change, lack of leadership support, and insufficient change management strategies and support can impede the uptake of healthcare technologies.
Organisational leadership plays a crucial role in creating a culture of innovation, by recognising digital competence as a core clinical skill and embedding digital tools into strategic objectives and performance frameworks.
Financial and Reimbursement Issues
The cost of implementing and maintaining healthcare technologies can be prohibitive, especially for smaller providers. Unclear or inadequate reimbursement models for digital services will mean new technologies could be cost prohibitive, discouraging adoption.
Governmental and policy-level enablers include provision of funding for infrastructure, reimbursement models for delivery of digital services and national frameworks for digital standards, all of which helps create the conditions for successful implementation and widespread adoption.
Psychological and Emotional Factors
Another key barrier is the psychological and emotional response to technology. Many clinicians, particularly those who are not digital natives, may experience anxiety, scepticism, or even resistance to change when faced with new digital tools.
This ‘technological inertia’ is often rooted in past experiences with poorly designed systems or in a broader sense of professional identity, where clinical judgement is seen as being undermined by algorithmic support. Fear of making errors and a general lack of confidence in navigating new systems for example can all contribute to reluctance, especially when training and support are lacking.
Clinicians may have concerns that healthcare technologies might depersonalise patient care, affecting the therapeutic relationship. This might also include a fear that technology could lead to miscommunication or even replace their human patient interaction.
Interoperability and Integration Challenges
A commonly cited barrier is a lack of adequate infrastructure and technical support. This includes unreliable internet access, insufficient hardware, outdated systems, and a lack of interoperability between platforms, which all drive ‘pain points’ during use and lead to abandonment. Technologies that are not intuitive or require complex navigation can frustrate users. The perception that learning to use new healthcare technologies is time-consuming can also deter clinicians.
These challenges are often more pronounced in rural or under-resourced settings, where clinicians may struggle to access basic digital tools or have unstable or slow internet connections. Even in more technologically advanced environments, the lack of seamless integration between systems such as electronic health records (EHRs), digital prescribing and clinical decision support systems can create frustrating, duplicative and inefficient workflows. This lack of interoperability can lead to fragmented workflows, data silos, and increased administrative burden, deterring some clinicians from adopting new technologies.
User-Centered Design and Usability
The usability of healthcare technologies significantly influences adoption rates. Perceived usefulness and clear benefits to patient care will influence adoption. Clinicians are more likely to embrace technology when they can see demonstrable improvements in care quality, such as reduce medication errors, enhance clinical decision-making, diagnostic accuracy, or patient satisfaction. However, clinicians frequently report that digital tools increase administrative burden, adding layers of documentation, system log-ins, and alerts that detract from face-to-face patient care.
While healthcare technologies are often marketed as efficiency enablers, the reality for many users is increased complexity, particularly during the initial phases of implementation. Without careful planning, clinicians may perceive these technologies as another pressure point in already overburdened healthcare systems.
The principle here is simple: if the technology helps rather than hinders clinical work, it will be used.
Technologies should be aligned with clinical routines and reduce duplication rather than add complexity. This means rigorous user testing, feedback loops, and iterative improvements. Where possible, digital tools should be interoperable with existing systems and designed to minimise disruption to patient care.
Training and Adoption Support
Organisations must invest in digital readiness, workforce development and change management. This includes assessing baseline digital literacy, providing protected time for training, and ensuring that IT support is responsive and accessible. Training that is ongoing, tailored to clinical roles, and embedded into organisational culture can create a more tech-confident workforce and reduce fear of the unknown.
While initial training is essential, the need for ongoing education to keep up with rapidly evolving technologies is often overlooked. Clinicians require continuous support to maintain proficiency and confidence in using healthcare technologies effectively. Digital champions and peer mentors can play a valuable role in encouraging uptake and troubleshooting problems as they arise.
When clinicians are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use digital tools, through well-designed, user-focused training programmes, they are far more likely to see these tools as assets rather than obstacles.
Evidence of Clinical Effectiveness
Scepticism about the clinical efficacy of certain healthcare technologies persists among healthcare professionals. The absence of robust, peer-reviewed studies demonstrating tangible benefits can lead to hesitancy in adoption. So evaluation and feedback mechanisms are essential.
Understanding how digital tools are being used, and whether they are delivering the intended outcomes, can guide continuous improvement and inform future procurement decisions. Feedback from frontline staff should be actively sought and used to refine digital health strategies. In turn, celebrating success stories and demonstrating the impact of healthcare technologies on clinical and patient outcomes can help build momentum and confidence across the system and across systems.
These is a need to engage clinicians early and meaningfully in the design, selection, and implementation of healthcare technologies. Technologies that are imposed from the top down without clinician input, will have slower uptake. Co-design and participatory approaches not only improve usability but also foster a sense of ownership, collaboration and trust.
In conclusion
The adoption of digital health technologies by healthcare professionals is shaped by a complex interplay of technical, personal, organisational, and systemic factors, requiring that health system take a holistic approach to implementation and adoption of technologies in healthcare. In doing so, health systems can ensure that clinicians are empowered, equipped, and supported to use digital tools to harness their full potential to improve care delivery, enhance patient outcomes, and support more sustainable models of healthcare.
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