Perception of Nursing Professionals Towards eHealth Application

Background: eHealth is one of the most promising applications in Health Care Sector. A well designed eHealth application assists the nursing professionals with easy access to the information about the patient, health and disease for achieving high quality patient care. This study was conducted with an aim to assess the level of perception of nursing professionals towards eHealth applications. Methodology: A prospective study was conducted among 52 Nursing Professionals of a nursing college of Southern India. A validated questionnaire consisted of 26 question based on 5 point Likert scale ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree with a score of 5 to 1 were administered to the participants after getting their due consent. Result: The perceptions were assessed on different aspect of eHealth application. The parameters where more than 80% of the nursing professionals agreed were mainly related to the support of eHealth applications in securing patient information, quality decision making in patient care and evaluating and enabling evidence based patient choice. More than 95% of the nursing Professionals agreed that the online research database, video conferring, web casting and online continuing medical education program can assist the health care practitioner in updating their knowledge in their respective domain. About 90% of the nursing professionals felt that the information generated through computerized health management information system assist the public health administrators in capturing and reporting public health information of the community and also in understanding their healthcare needs. The nursing professionals also agreed to the fact that the e-claim can assist the patients and providers in fast and easy claim processing and also in improving the productivity of the hospital. All the nursing professionals felt the need of such application in all the hospital for providing healthcare to the patient and community. Conclusion: The study reported high level of perception about eHealth application among nurses but there were few of them who had no opinion about these applications in patient care, research and education, public health and in administration. The awareness and training program could be a better platform to improve the level of perception and acceptability of these applications among the nursing professionals