Preparedness of Nurses at Hospitals to Utilize a Paperless Environment

Abstract

The embracing of Health Information Technology (HIT) by hospitals is viewed as one mechanism to mitigate the ever-growing healthcare supply
and demand gap, reduce medical errors, increase efficiency, improve quality of care and automate business processes. This has led to many hospitals investing large sums of money in the hope that HIT can help hospitals achieve this goal. The problem, however, is that similar to other industries that have undertaken this journey towards embracing Information Technology (IT), hospitals have not been very successful and have not
achieved the expected benefits of IT. One of the major contributing factors to the high failure rate of IT implementation within the healthcare sector is user acceptance. The reason for low user acceptance can be attributed to HIT being a disruptive technology that changes the existing work procedures and processes. The main objective of this study was to determine the preparedness of nurses to adopt a paperless environment and to determine if the nurses were equipped with the necessary skills to be able to function within a paperless environment. A quantitative approach was used to gather information from a private hospital within the eThekwini municipality in KwaZulu-Natal. Hundred and sixty questionnaires were handed out and a total of 102 questionnaires were successfully answered giving the researcher a response rate of 64%. The findings indicate that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use by nurses are enablers to HIT usage while resistance to change is an inhibitor to HIT usage. The findings also indicate that both related knowledge and perceived compatibilities have a positive effect on the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use respectively.