Date of Conferral

2021

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Public Health

Advisor

Richard Jimenez

Abstract

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system that affects close to 400,000 patients in the United States and roughly 2.3 million people around the world. Because this is a growing global public health concern, researchers and clinicians are calling for a more efficient adoption of these McDonald MS guidelines in clinical practice as outlined in newly diagnosed guidelines. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between the independent variables gender, guidelines knowledge, years in practice and intent to use the McDonald MS guidelines for diagnosing MS among physicians. The diffusion of innovation model was used to help understand and interpret the findings. The study sample consisted of 161 practicing physicians who treat MS patient in the Midwestern United-States recruited using convenience purposeful sampling. Data were collected by electronic survey using Survey Monkey. Binary logistic and multiple logistic regression to test the association between variables yielded no association between variables or the presence of predictor for the outcome. Analysis revealed gender (odds ratio [OR] =1.5; p=.347), knowledge (OR=1.23; p= .600), and years in practice (OR=1.015; p=.404) were not a predictor of intent. These findings contradict research on factors affecting the adoption of new technologies in fields other than treatment of MS. The positive social change impact of understanding factors associated with the adoption of the guidelines by clinicians is a resulting increase in use for effective diagnoses of MS.

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