A Holistic View on Facilitators and Barriers of EHR Usage from the Pa...

Background: Health digitalization has been accelerated by various contemporary challenges and boosted by the ongoing pandemic. (Meister et al., 2018) When digitalization started, one promising endeavour was to connect patient-related electronic health records (EHR) in the specific setting of the communication between health care providers during a consecutive treatment process. (Tenforder et al., 2011) In Austria, the roll-out plan of EHR implementation is lagging behind the original schedule due to different reasons, one of them being that EHR use remains behind expectations. Thus, our research project aims at gaining in-depth knowledge of the various barriers and facilitators of 1) patients' and 2) physicians' usage along the entire EHR usage process (in each phase: beginning with awareness-raising, proceeding to adoption, usage, and the final consequences of EHR usage) and their experiences so far.

Method: A qualitative approach using four focus group discussions (patients' perspective) and eight expert interviews (physicians' perspective) is utilized. All focus group discussions and interviews are transcribed in full verbatim and analysed using qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014).

Findings: A holistic view on the topic is gained by comparing the in-depth knowledge of patients' and physicians' perspectives on three levels and along the entire usage process. The results were discussed at the ICCH 2022.