BACKGROUND: Providing patients online access to their electronic health records (EHR) holds considerable potential to improve care. As a Swedish pilot project, the County Council of Uppsala carries out an EU deployment project, which gives the 350 000 citizens access to their EHR through a national healthcare portal. This pilot project started in 2012 and when it ends in December 2014, the majority of the Swedish county councils are expected to follow the example of providing patients access to health data. Therefore it is of great importance to capture care professionals’, patients and other stakeholders’ opinions about such public eHealth services. The survey presented here is part of a large research project (DOME) on the Deployment of Online Medical records and other eHealth services in Sweden. The overall objective is to disseminate knowledge about adoption and use of public eHealth services aiming at benefits for both patients and healthcare.
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to investigate different professionals’ experiences from and opinions about patients having access to their EHRs online. What are the opinions today? Do the opinions differ between different care professionals? Do experiences from the pilot county result in other opinions compared to the regions where the public eHealth services are not yet implemented?
METHOD AND MATERIALS: In this survey the respondents are members of Vårdförbundet (the Swedish Association of Health Professionals), the trade union and professional organization of four registered professions; nurses, midwives, biomedical scientists and radiographers. The survey is currently ongoing and during the first week of March, 6300 registered nurses (RN) and midwives throughout Sweden got the questionnaire via their professional email addresses. The questionnaire was constructed from questions used in a pilot study that tested them for reliability (Cronbachs´s-α) and validity (content-validity and face validity). It consisted of eight background questions and five blocks of statements where the magnitudes of agreement were given by answering to a five-graded Likert scale from “not at all”-agreement to “great extent”-agreement”. In the end of each block there was an open question where the respondents could write their experiences or opinions in free text.
EXPECTED RESULT: Other studies in DOME have shown that the opinions differ between the professionals and other stakeholders (patients, relatives, managers and politicians). Especially physicians in the county council where the pilot project is taking place have been reluctant to this change and the local union even tried to stop the deployment project. Present study will result in knowledge about the opinions and experiences of other care professionals, in this case RNs and midwives.
EXPECTED CONCLUSION: One of the main arguments that physicians had against the eHealth service, before it was launched, was that the EHRs are to be seen primarily as working documents for the healthcare professionals and that patients would not understand them and thus not benefit from reading them on their own. Here is the possibility to evaluate Uppsala healthcare professionals’ opinions after working a year with the new system and analyze current attitudes in the rest of Sweden. Yet to come; the results of this survey are expected to conclude the differences between both professions and regions, which can have implications for the healthcare provided.
2014.