Diffusion of Electronic Medical Record Based Public Hospital Information Systems

OBJECTIVES This study was conducted to evaluate the adoption behavior of a newly developed Electronic Medical Record (EMR)-based information system (IS) at three public hospitals in Korea with a focus on doctors and nurses. METHODS User satisfaction scores from four performance layers were analyzed before and two times after the newly develop system was introduced to evaluate the adoption process of the IS with Rogers' diffusion theory. RESULTS The 'intention to use' scores, the most important indicator for determining whether or not to adopt the IS in Rogers' confirmation stage for doctors, were very high in the third survey (4.21). In addition, the scores for 'reduced medication errors', which is the key indicator for evaluating the success of the IS, increased in the third survey for both doctors and nurses. The factors influencing 'intention to use' with a high odds ratio (>1.5) were the 'frequency of attendance of user training sessions', 'mandatory use of system', 'reduced medication errors', and 'reduced medical record documentation time' for both doctors and nurses. CONCLUSIONS These findings show that the new EMR-based IS was well accepted by doctors. Both doctors and nurses also positively considered the effects of the new IS on their clinical environments.