Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Nov 6, 2019
Date Accepted: Feb 6, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Why Some Patients Want Care-Providers to Unplug?: A Cross Sectional Study on Smart Device Usage in the Emergency Department
ABSTRACT
Background:
Health care provider (HCP) usage of smart devices (SD) is increasing globally, with little understanding of patient perceptions on usage in the health care setting.
Objective:
This study aims to assess patients’ attitudes towards smart device usage by health care providers in the emergency department (ED) and identify predictors of their attitudes.
Methods:
The study was carried out at the Emergency Department (ED) of a large academic tertiary care medical center in Lebanon. A cross-sectional survey design was utilized in this study with a questionnaire administered to medically stable adult patients, presenting to the ED with an Emergency Severity Index of 3, 4, or 5, between January 2017 and March 2018. The questionnaire collected relevant patient demographic information and questions related to their SD usage. The questionnaire also included questions that evaluated patients’ attitudes to the use of SDs by HCPs in six major domains: role in health care, distraction potential, impact on communication, empathy, privacy, and professionalism. The attitudes towards SD usage in the ED was the main outcome variable in this study. A step-wise logistic regression model assessed the association between the outcome variable and the demographic and attitudinal independent variables.
Results:
The study had a response rate of 70% from 338 patients. While the majority (92.6%) of respondents agreed that smart devices improve health care delivery, 39.1% (95% CI: 34.0 – 44.4) were opposed to their usage by healthcare providers in the Emergency Department. The majority agreed that smart devices are a source of distraction to healthcare providers in the workplace (71.0%). Females [OR=1.67, 95% CI: (1.00 – 2.78)] as well as patients who believed that smart devices were a source of distraction [OR=2.54, 95% CI: (1.36 – 4.76)], reflected lack of professionalism [OR=2.77, 95% CI (1.59– 4.82)], and impacted the provider’s ability to relate to them [OR=2.93, 95% CI (1.72 – 4.99)] were more likely to agree that smart devices should not be used in the emergency department.
Conclusions:
Patients’ negative attitude towards smart devices use in the emergency department is largely driven by patient gender (females), patient perception of the distraction potential of smart devices, their negative impact on their provider’s empathy and professionalism. The findings of this study shed light on the importance of getting stakeholders to institute a digital professionalism code of conduct for providers working in acute health care settings. Clinical Trial: NA
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