Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 8, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 11, 2024 - Mar 7, 2024
Date Accepted: Apr 16, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
The Paradoxes of Digital Tools in Hospitals: A Qualitative Interview Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Digital tools are progressively reshaping the daily work of healthcare professionals in hospitals. While this transformation holds substantial promise, yet it leads to frustrating experiences, raising concerns about negative impacts on clinicians’ well-being.
Objective:
The goal of this study was to comprehensively explore the lived experiences of healthcare professionals navigating digital tools throughout their daily routines.
Methods:
Qualitative in-depth interviews with 52 healthcare professionals representing 24 medical specialties across 14 hospitals in Switzerland were performed.
Results:
Inductive thematic analysis revealed four main themes: digital tool usage, workflow and processes, healthcare professionals’ experience of care delivery, and digital transformation and management of change. Within these themes, six intriguing paradoxes emerged which may partly explain the persistence of the challenges facing hospital digitalization, namely the promise of efficiency and the reality of inefficiency, the shift from face-to-face to interface, juggling frustration and dedication, the illusion of information access and trust, the complexity and intersection of workflows and care paths, and the opportunities and challenges of shadow IT.
Conclusions:
In the light of these paradoxes and the experiences revealed in our study, we developed recommendations to support the transformation of healthcare technology and mitigate negative experiences. These include the need for hospital IT systems to be designed more flexible, adaptable, and lightweight, using open-source infrastructures, considering a phased approach for system upgrades, offering effective IT training, and implementing communication guidelines.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.