Too burdened to benefit: job demands and the fading perceived usefulness of health IT

BACKGROUND: Healthcare professionals in France are exposed to increasing job demands, including clinical workload, administrative burden, and work-life intrusion, all of which contribute to elevated strain and burnout. Health Information Technologies are expected to act as valuable job resources by improving efficiency and supporting task coordination. Yet little is known about whether HITs are associated with a weaker relationship between job demands and strain, and whether their perceived usefulness declines when workload becomes excessive. This study applies the Job Demands-Resources model to outpatient healthcare professionals to examine how job demands are associated with strain, vocational attachment, and the perceived usefulness of HIT. METHODS: A nationwide cross-sectional survey was conducted among users of a major French scheduling HIT. A total of 1,298 valid responses were analyzed. Job demands and strain were specified as formative higher-order constructs. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling was used to test the model, assess moderating effects, and evaluate potential curvilinear relationships be-tween job demands and perceived usefulness. RESULTS: Job demands were strongly and positively associated with strain (β = 0.67), which was in turn associated with lower vocational attachment (β = -0.48). Recognition was positively associated with perceived fairness of remuneration (β = 0.40), and perceived fairness of remuneration was positively associated with vocational attachment (β = 0.18). Perceived usefulness (PU) was asso-ciated with a small but significant weakening of the job demands-strain relationship (β = -0.05). At the same time, increasing job demands were associated with a decline in PU (β = -0.22). CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that while perceived usefulness of health information technologies is as-sociated with a small weakening of the relationship between job demands and strain, their per-ceived usefulness declines as work demands intensify. This self-limiting pattern highlights the risk of treating digital tools as stable resources without addressing the workload conditions that shape professionals' capacity to benefit from them.