Physicians and nurses’ readiness in using electronic health record (EHR)

Abstract

Hospitals are expected to move toward implementing electronic health record. There are many benefits and challenges promised by EHR implementation. Physicians and nurses play pivotal roles as users to the success of EHR implementation. It is important to understand physicians and nurses’ readiness in using EHR. This study aimed to identify physicians’ and nurses’ readiness in using EHR at one of academic hospitals in Indonesia.

This was a quantitative descriptive study with a cross sectional design. There were 178 clinicians (41 physicians and 137 nurses) who work at inpatient are involved in the study. A questionnaire developed by Koolaee et al. (2015) was used to measure clinicians’ readiness in the aspect of attitude toward EHR, computer skills, and knowledge about EHR. Questions about digitization of patient documentation, digitization of patient development graphic, connection of all equipment with EHR, barcode usage, and data integration for making decision were added to better understand their readiness. The results showed that physicians and nurses expressed positive attitude in using EHR (4.2 out of 5 and 4.0 out of 5 respectively). Both physicians and nurses master certain skills related to computer. Physicians and nurses did not have enough knowledge about EHR, especially at terminology and main goals of EHR. As conclusion, physicians and nurses are ready to use EHR. Some factors that make clinicians’ ready in using EHR are most of the staffs are young, it is a teaching hospital, the hospital has been implementing EHR since it is founded, and the staffs have positive attitudes toward EHR.