Track

Health Care IT

Abstract

IT in health care can lower the cost of health care delivery, improve the quality of care for patients and reduce medical errors.Given these strong advantages, it is interesting that technology diffusion for process support in hospitals is somewhat slow.The major process of a hospital -delivering patient care- is still supported by traditional paper files in the vast majority ofGerman hospitals.In this paper, we ask what the barriers towards implementing and using an electronic medical record (EMR) -the electronicpatient file- might be. Technology resistance theories indicate that perceived risks are a major inhibitor towards systemsacceptance. In the absence of thorough empirical studies, we start our investigation by conducting exploratory research intothe risks hospital-based physicians associate with using an EMR. A list of possible risks was derived from the literature and10 physicians were interviewed to gather their assessment. Our findings show that, indeed, physicians associate several riskswith adopting EMRs, thereby suggesting these risks will need to be mitigated to enable proper user acceptance.

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