The View from the Trenches: Satisfaction with eHealth systems by a group of health professionals

Abstract

The integration and adoption of eHealth systems within the health sector faces challenges. As health care practitioners are the end users of eHealth systems, their perceptions of these systems are critical in order to address the issues surrounding their implementation and application. This paper presents the views that a group of health care professionals hold regarding the eHealth systems that they use as part of their day to day work. These views were analysed according to the perceptions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with eHealth systems that these professionals expressed. They expressed satisfaction with the information consistency, work efficiency, access to information, quality of information, and availability of technical support associated with their systems use. They expressed dissatisfaction with a lack of communication and compatibility between systems, deficiency in terms of system functionality, a lack of system reliability, a lack of initial and ongoing training, and a need to develop workarounds in order to achieve work goals. Overall this research indicates that satisfaction with eHealth systems is a complex issue, and that the negative aspects of system satisfaction need to be addressed and the positive aspects carefully built upon.