Antecedents to the user adoption of electronic medical record

Abstract

One of the main applications of information and communication technologies in healthcare sector is Electronic Medical Record (EMR). EMR systems are expected to make benefits for healthcare providers, professionals and the health population as a whole. Actually, the EMR benefits cannot be achieved without the adoption of the system by users in the healthcare. There has been much research suggested that EMR has not been adopted as expected. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack in research which provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the factors affecting EMR user adoption. The aim of the present study was to conduct a systematic literature review to extract factors impacting EMR user adoption and to clarify them into meaningful categories. We searched in nine scientific databases and 9684 papers found as initial screening. We excluded papers based on their title, abstract and full text and finally we had 89 relevant papers which focus on factors impacting EMR adoption. We extracted factors and identified 8 main categories: individual, psychological, behavioural, environmental, organizational, financial, legal, and technical. Our results have important implications for researchers and practitioners, including policy makers, marketers, information technology (IT) professionals, and EMR system developers.