Adoption and Barriers to Adoption of Electronic Health Records by Nurses in Three Governmental Hospitals in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia.

Although electronic health records (EHRs) have been implemented in many hospitals and healthcare providers benefit from their effective and efficient data processing, their evaluation from nurses has received little attention. This project aimed to assess the adoption and barriers to the use of an EHR system by nurses at three governmental hospitals implementing the same EHR software and functionalities in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. The study was a cross-sectional, paper-based questionnaire study. SPSS version 20 was used for data entry and analysis, and descriptive statistics were calculated. The study found underutilization of almost all functionalities among all hospitals and no utilization of any communication tools with patients. In addition, there were no instances of "allowing patients to use the Internet to access parts of their health records." The most frequently cited barrier among all hospitals was "loss of access to medical records transiently if computer crashes or power fails" (88.6 percent). This was followed by "lack of continuous training/ support from information technology staff in hospital" (85.9 percent), "additional time required for data entry" (84.9 percent), and "system hanging up problem" (83.8 percent). Complexity of technology (81.6 percent) and lack of system customizability (81.1 percent) were also frequently reported problems. The formation of an EHR committee to discuss problems with the system in Saudi hospitals is recommended.