Merit Research Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences

066-077

Authors: Hanan Asiri, Bakheet AlDosari and Basema Saddik

This exploratory study aims to explore the direct and indirect effects of the Organizational factors (i.e. Organizational Support, Adequate Training, and User Involvement) and the Professional factors (i.e. Nurse Autonomy, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, and Nurse-Client Relationship) on nurses’ attitude and acceptance of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system using the proposed model. The study is cross-sectional in nature and gathered sample data from nurses working in a regional hospital in Riyadh (i. e. King AbdulAziz Medical City KAMC), KSA. A hard copy of the questionnaire was randomly distributed among the staff constituting the sample of 333 nurses using a Stratified Random Sampling method that stratified the sample according to their nursing units/departments in the organization. This study’s sampling frame was taken from among nurses working in a hospital which has already implemented an EMR system, in which nursing personnel with more than 6-month experience using the EMR system were recruited to ensure enough experience among nurses. The study unit of analysis is the individual nurse. Path analysis was used to predict the results. Chi Square was used also as a goodness of fit measure to determine if the model is an acceptable fit or not. Even though the sample was compared to different population, i.e. physicians due to the fact that the model used in this study was only used previously on physicians, nurses expressed a positive attitude towards the EMR system which is similar to the result of a previous study (3.74) on physicians attitude (Morton, 2008). The conducted correlation showed that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a positive moderate significant relationship with attitude. Nurse involvement, adequate training, and nurse client relationship have a positive weak, yet statistically significant relationship with attitude. Management support, nurse autonomy, and Organizational Citizenship behavior have a positive weak, but insignificant relationship with nurses’ attitude. Based on the result of this study, nurses have a positive attitude towards the EMR system. Yet, a source of conflict with management might be present. Perceived usefulness was found to be the factor most strongly related to the dependent variable attitude towards EMR usage and acceptance. The results also showed that nurses preferred group setting training and felt that both nurses and executives are in consensus regarding their attitude towards EMR adoption. Nurses repeatedly indicate their need for more support from their management and the need for another form of training that adapt to each user individual needs and method of learning. Keywords: Nurse, attitude, Acceptance, Use, TAM, Training, Users Involvement, Management Support, Autonomy, Nurse-Client relationship (NCR), Organizational-Citizenship Behavior (OCB).