Perception and preparedness of stakeholders at hospitals to utilize a paperless environment.

Abstract

The embracing of Health Information Technology (HIT) by hospitals is viewed as one mechanism to mitigate the ever-growing healthcare supply and demand gap, reduce medical errors, increase efficiency, improve quality of care and automate business processes. This has led to many hospitals investing large sums of money in the hope that HIT can help hospitals achieve this goal. The problem, however, is that similar to other industries that have undertaken this journey towards embracing Information Technology (IT), hospitals have not been very successful and have not achieved the expected benefits of IT. One of the major contributing factors to the high failure rate of IT implementation within the healthcare sector is user acceptance. The main objective of this study was to determine the perception and preparedness of clinical stakeholders to adopt a paperless environment and to determine if the clinical stakeholders were equipped with the necessary skills to be able to function within a paperless environment. Due to the nature of the study, a quantitative approach was used to gather information using a questionnaire. The private hospital that agreed to participate in the study is from the eThekwini municipality. A total of 300 questionnaires were handed out to the nursing clerk at the hospital and a total of 102 questionnaires were successfully answered giving the researcher a response rate of 34%. The findings of the study indicate that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use by clinical stakeholders are enablers to HIT usage while resistance to change is an inhibitor to HIT usage. The findings also indicate that both related knowledge and perceived compatibilities have a positive effect on the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use respectively.