Adoption of electronic patient record in teaching hospitals in Brazil and Spain. The perception of health professionals

Abstract

This paper describes health professionals’ perception upon electronic patient record on hospitals management and the impact of that technology on work. Data collection was undertook from 2009 to 2010 involving 336 users of this health record in two teaching hospitals, being one in Brazil and the other in Spain. The research respondents filled in a questionnaire with standardized answers on a Likert concordance scale. Descriptive and inferential statistics analysis were done and the main results show that: a) this technology is perceived as a mechanism of support of hospital management control; b) the more the respondents skills on managing information technology tools the more they agree about the record impact on their performance; c) there are significant statistically differences on average respondents perception upon the role of that record over their performance, taking into account length of service and the hospital (or country) where the research participants work. At the end further studies are suggested.