Benefits of ICT Adoption and Use in Regional General Medical Practices: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study of benefits derived from information and communications technology(ICT) adoption and use in medical practices in regional Australia. The study involved 122 regional medical practitioners. The results show that like the more general small business sector, the perception of certain benefits is associated with the size of the practice (in terms of employee levels) and/or the gender of the respondent practitioner. The data also showed that the level of skill of certain software used within the practice was significantly associated with the level of perceived benefit derived from ICT adoption and use.

Perceived Impact of Electronic Medical Records in Physician Office Practices: A Review of Survey-Based Research

“…Several papers presented results for both categories [21,22,25-27,29,33-35,37,38], 1 looked only at preimplementation [36], and a few were only postimplementation views [23,24,30-32,39]. The implementation state of respondents’ EMR systems was not clear in 1 paper [28].…”

“…In terms of respondents, the majority of surveys were administered to the physicians themselves [22-24,26,29,30-34], including specialists [33,39] such as pediatricians [27,34] and ophthalmologists [21]. In some cases, the respondents were the entire practice [25,38], nurses [23,31], or administrative office staff [37].…”

“…Others were specifically concerned with assessing perceived barriers to adoption [22,25,27,29,32-35,37,38], benefits [21,22,25,27,28,30,38], or overall attitudes toward adoption or use [22-24,26,27,29,31,32,34,36]. A few looked at physician satisfaction in general [21,22,39] and 2 focused on specific functionality [31,32].…”

“…(Note that these categories are not mutually exclusive.) Of the selected papers, 4 considered information and communication technology in general [26,30,36] but described features of EMRs, so we included them as well.…”

“…A total of 6 papers [22,24,27,30,35,36] reported on 8 metrics for communication with other providers and health care professionals. We calculated odds ratios for 2 papers and found that, in both cases, users were likelier to hold a positive view.…”