JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The implementation of electronic Health Record Suites has the potential to provide healthcare providers with a support standardization of patient care, pathways and workflows, as well as to provide organizations with data for business intelligence and to provide medical staff with decision support, easier access, and the same interface across its features and subsystems. The realization of these potentials requires an implementation process where the expectations of the medical staff and the provider of the new system should be aligned with respect to the medical staff’s knowledge and skills and the interface and performance of the system. Awareness of the medical staff’s eHealth literacy may be a way to understand and align these expectations and to follow the progression of the implementation process.

Objective:

The objective is to investigate how a newly developed and modified instrument measuring medical staff’s eHealth literacy (staff-eHLQ) can be used to inform the system provider and the health care organization in the implementation process and to evaluate whether the medical staff’s perception of the ease of use will change and how this may be related to their level of eHealth literacy.

Methods:

A modified version of the newly developed eHealth literacy questionnaire was distributed to the staff in a medical department in Denmark three months prior to and three months after implementation of a new electronic health record suite. The survey also included questions related to the user’s perceived ease of use.

Results:

The response rate of 295 distributed surveys was 65.76% in the first round and 67.11% in the second. The mean age in the baseline sample is 43.1 years and 42.3 in the follow up sample. After the implementation the only difference compared to the baseline data was a decrease in staff-eHLQ5, Motivated to engage with digital services (unpaired t-test, p-value = 0.0092), The value of the scales relating to the medical staff’s knowledge and skills (eHLQ1-3) were around 3 or above for both baseline and follow up. The range of score was narrower after the implementation indicating that some of those with the lowest ability benefitted from the training and new experience with the eHRS. There was an association between perceived ease of use and the three tested staff-eHLQ scales both before and after the implementation

Conclusions:

Staff-eHLQ may be a good candidate to monitor the medical staff’s response to their training during the implementation of an eHRS. It may also inform those responsible for the implementation if the process is not going according to plan, with respect to the staff’s knowledge, skills, trust in security, motivation and experience of a coherent system that suits their needs and supports the workflows and the data availability.