Role of Compatibility Views on Physician Adoption of Electronic Health Record Systems

Use of electronic health record (EHR) systems has become one of the most important activities in healthcare in the United States. This research seeks to give further explication to physicians’ electronic health record system adoption decisions. Hypotheses are presented relating disaggregated compatibility constructs, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use in the physicians’ EHR system adoption decision. Hypotheses are also presented for moderation of these relationships by personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology. The research comes full circle with a qualitative exploration of physicians’ experiences in using electronic health record systems. Physician’s perceived compatibility with existing work practices, perceived compatibility with prior experience, and perceived compatibility with values were shown to be antecedents to both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. These findings replicate previous work but were unable to demonstrate moderation of these relationships by personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology. Additionally, the relationships between use and both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were not significant. The descriptive qualitative study was conducted to provide further explanation of the lack of significance in these relationships. Several themes were developed to describe the physicians’ lived experience with use of electronic healthcare record systems. These were quality of information, expended time, effects on work life, and values. The qualitatively developed themes were described in relationship to the compatibility constructs. The results provide information to electronic health record system administrators to inform development of user interfaces that allow the physicians to most effectively and efficiently diagnose and treat patients. Further academic work is suggested to evaluate potential correspondence of the themes with existing management information system theories