Acute care nurses' perceptions of electronic health record use: A mixed method study

Gillian Strudwick; Linda McGillis Hall; Lynn Nagle; Patricia Trbovich

doi:10.1002/nop2.157

Acute care nurses' perceptions of electronic health record use: A mixed method study

Nurs Open. 2018 May 7;5(4):491-500. doi: 10.1002/nop2.157. eCollection 2018 Oct.

Authors

Gillian Strudwick¹, Linda McGillis Hall², Lynn Nagle², Patricia Trbovich³

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Toronto ON Canada.
² Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing University of Toronto Toronto ON Canada.
³ Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation University of Toronto Toronto ON Canada.

Abstract

Aim: The overall aim of this study is to examine nurses' perceptions of electronic health record use in an acute care hospital setting.

Design: This study uses a sequential mixed methods design in two phases.

Methods: Phase one consists of a survey of Registered Nurses to understand nurses' perceptions of electronic health record use. Phase two is comprised of focus groups of a subsample from phase one. Data collection occurred from November 2015 - August 2016 and was done in Toronto, Canada.

Results: In phase one, navigation was found to be a predictor of nurses' perceptions of electronic health record use. In phase two, participants discussed the following five topics: (1) navigation; (2) functionality; (3) organizational standards; (4) documentation workload and (5) issues of system performance and response time. This study has implications for organizations implementing electronic health records, nursing leaders and electronic health record vendors.

Keywords: acute care; health services research; information technology; medical nursing; surgical nursing.