This study aims to examine clinicians’ perspectives on the diffusion, adoption and routinization of artificial intelligence (AI) use in hearing care organizations. While clinicians act as gatekeepers of technology adoption, they also engage with AI-generated outputs as a form of knowledge that must be evaluated, validated and integrated into clinical practice. By focusing on how clinicians make sense of and use AI-generated knowledge, the study addresses the limited understanding of post-adoption routinization of AI in healthcare settings.
The study adopts a qualitative research design, using open-ended essays to capture hearing care clinicians’ lived professional experiences. The collected textual data were analyzed using an inductive-abductive approach. Guided by diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory, the study examined how clinicians engage with AI-generated knowledge across stages of adoption and sustained use.
The analysis uncovers the drivers of diffusion, adoption and routinization of AI-enabled innovations, and maps them to five DOI innovation attributes. Specifically, it identifies drivers such as diagnostic precision, workflow integration, hands-on experimentation and quantifiable patient outcomes that explain how clinicians evaluate, validate and integrate AI-generated insights into everyday clinical decision-making.
This study contributes to the knowledge management literature by showing that AI diffusion, adoption and routinization can be understood as processes of knowledge evaluation, integration and stabilization within professional practice. In addition, by extending DOI through a knowledge lens, the study offers a novel clinician-centered framework that explains how AI-generated knowledge is embedded in routine decision-making in knowledge-intensive settings.
