Physician’s Resistance to EHR Post Successful Organizational Adoption: Dual Factors Investigative Study
The introduction of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) has drastically improved the quality of health care, streamlined the processing of its tasks, and enhanced the retention of patient data for the hospitals of today. This research is a response to a call for an investigation of the reasons or factors that could affect health care workers’ decision to use or to resist software once it has been implemented. Physicians form the focus of this study because previous research demonstrates that physicians are an important user group of EMR. Physicians’ attitudes about using and their resistance to correlate with the attitudes of the other hospital employees towards the software. Previous resistance-related studies utilized the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and its constructs in their attempts to explain the problem of resistance. This study uses the UTAUT theory constructs of Enablers and Inhibitors (i.e., Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social influence (SI), and Facilitating Conditions (FC)) to formulate interview questions for the purposes of finding new factors that lead physicians to resist software after it has been implemented when working under pressure in the emergency room (ER) or intensive care unit (ICU). At the end, the study was able to produce a number of solutions and suggestions for hospital management to follow and apply before the final transition between the two systems. Those will help hospitals’ management to take care of and address them before new software is implemented in order to avoid falling into the resistance trap again, avoid any issues related to new system usage, and prepare for any new and unexpected issues that might face physicians working in ER/ICU. Finally, the study found that some of the factors that has been identified as factors that significantly affect physicians’ intention to EMR, may no longer be as relevant. For example, social influence (SI), technology anxiety (TA), resistance to change (RTC) may not be significant factors in the context of EMR use in the ICU/ER. Mandating using the new system for physicians plays a role in that big shift. However, new factors like frustration, mandating the system, and training and training duration are important factors found to be affecting physicians’ usage of the new system. Moreover, results suggest that age and years of experience (NOT Age and Gender) should be considered in future studies that examine technology use.
EHR, EMR, hospital systems, physicians usage of electronic medical records, resistance, resistance to Electronic health records, Health Information Technology
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