Electronic Physician (ISSN: 2008-5842) http://www.ephysician.

ir
June 2017, Volume: 9, Issue: 6, Pages: 4625-4630, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.19082/4625

Challenges of using Hospital Information Systems by nurses: comparing academic and non-academic
hospitals

Leila Ahmadian1, Nafise Dorosti2, Reza Khajouei3, Sadrieh Hajesmaeel Gohari4

1
Ph.D. in Medical Informatics, Associate Professor of Medical Informatics, Medical Informatics Research Center,
Institute for Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
2
B.Sc. in Health Information Technology, School of Management and Health Information Sciences, Kerman
University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
3
Ph.D. in Medical Informatics, Associate Professor of Medical Informatics, Health Services Management Research
Center, Institute for Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
4
M.Sc. in Health Information Technology, Social Determinants of Health Research Center, Institute for Futures
Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran

Type of article: Original

Abstract
Background and aim: Hospital Information Systems (HIS) are used for easy access to information,
improvement of documentation and reducing errors. Nonetheless, using these systems is faced with some barriers
and obstacles. This study identifies the challenges and the obstacles of using these systems in the academic and
non-academic hospitals in Kerman.
Methods: This is a cross-sectional study which was carried out in 2015. The statistical population in this study
consisted of the nurses who had been working in the academic and non-academic hospitals in Kerman. A
questionnaire consisting of two sections was used. The first section consisted of the demographic information of
the participants and the second section comprised 34 questions about the challenges of HIS use. Data were
analyzed by the descriptive and statistical analysis (t-test, and ANOVA) using SPSS 19 software.
Results: The most common and important challenges in the academic hospitals were about human environment
factors, particularly “negative attitude of society toward using HIS”. In the non-academic hospitals, the most
common and important challenges were related to human factors, and among them, “no incentive to use system”
was the main factor. The results of the t-test method revealed that there was a significant relationship between
gender and the mean score of challenges related to the organizational environment category in the academic
hospitals and between familiarity with HIS and mean score of human environment factors (p<0.05). The results
of the ANOVA test also revealed that the educational degree and work experience in the healthcare environment
(years) in the academic hospitals have a significant relationship with the mean score related to the hardware
challenges, as well, experience with HIS has a significant relationship, with the mean score related to the human
challenges (p<0.05).
Conclusion: The most important challenges in using the information systems are the factors related to the human
environment and the human factors. The results of this study can bring a good perspective to the policy makers
and the managers regarding obstacles of using HISs from the nurses’ perspective, so that they can solve their
problems and can successfully implement these systems.
Keywords: Hospital Information System, Nurses, Barriers, Implementation

Corresponding author:
Sadrieh Hajesmaeel Gohari, Social Determinants of Health Research Center, Institute for Futures Studies in Health,
Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran.
Tel: +98.9134411339, Email: sadriehhajesmaili@yahoo.com
Received: April 25, 2016, Accepted: February 10, 2017, Published: June 2017
iThenticate screening: September 14, 2016, English editing: April 12, 2017, Quality control: June 10, 2017
© 2017 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is
non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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1. Introduction
Nowadays, information and communication technology has affected all areas of human knowledge. The health and
treatment sector also has benefitted from this technology due to the large volume of produced information as well as
the informational diversity. Accordingly, the Hospital Information System (HIS) has been developed (1). In general,
the aim of the HIS is to use computers and communicational instruments to gather, save, process, and extract patient
data and to create a link between caring and management information of patients (2). The HIS is designed to manage
all aspect of care including its financial, administrative, and clinical (3). The benefits of these systems include easy
access to information, improving the quality of documentation, reducing the errors especially the medical errors,
improving the quality of patient care, enhancing the information integration, reducing hospitals costs, extending the
database, and improving hospital management (4). The need for these systems is caused by factors including the
complexity of the hospital as an organization, resources limitation, production of increasing information, the
necessity of examining the cost effectiveness, the necessity of increasing the information quality, medical studies
and related science (5). Despite the benefits of an HIS, these systems have not been used widely and also, users are
unable to use them easily (6). In the recent decades, the role of the nurse as an HIS user has been changed from a
passive to an independent and determinant form (7). Enhancing the nurses’ responsibilities is implied to have high
knowledge and skills and also to be able to make decisions. The role of nurses in patient care is too extensive.
Working conditions such as long night shifts and unpredictable working issues, and emergencies increase the
likelihood of fatigue and physical inactivity and subsequently raise the risk of working errors. Management of
medical prescriptions is the main function of nurses and an important part of the treatment process and patient care.
Hence, any medication errors can cause serious problems in the health care system and is considered as a threat for
patient safety (9). One of the most common solutions to reduce nursing errors is the Nursing Information System as
a sub-system of HIS which can support caring processing in terms of the administrative and clinical aspects, by its
specific performance. These systems manage the clinical data, and its purpose is to help nurses in improving the care
of the patients via supporting the nursing care process (10). At the moment, there are different computerized systems
to register information related to nursing. The function of these systems is more related to the management of the
ward’s beds, moving and transferring the patients, para clinical results order entry, medication orders entry,
registering the number of the physician’s visits, and in some systems, documenting the vital signs, registering the
nurse’s reports, nursing Kardex, nursing shifts and the clinical ward management. Nevertheless, nurses do not use
HIS sufficiently to document the provided services to the patients. The studies showed that factors like security
issues, technical skills (11), changing the working processes (12) and lack of training and knowledge of users on
how to use these systems (2) are the factors which prevent using the information systems in the healthcare sector.
These barriers have not been studied from the perspective of nurses as one of the most important employees in the
health care sector; therefore, this study examines the challenges and barriers to use the information systems in both
academic and non-academic hospitals of Kerman. Identifying these factors can provide a suitable context to develop
and use the mentioned systems in hospitals. Also, implementing these systems can provide some solutions to
increase efficiency in hospitals.

2. Material and Methods

This is a cross-sectional study to investigate the challenges of using nursing information systems from the nurses’
perspective that has been carried out in 2015. The research population consisted of 1,467 nurses working in the non-
academic hospitals: (Ayatollah Kashani, Seyed-o-shohada, Alzahra, Fatema-ta-zahra, Razieh firouz, Mehregan, and
Arjomand) and the academic hospitals (Shafa, Bahonar, Afzali pour and Shahid Beheshti) of Kerman. The sampling
was done using random stratified sampling method. In order to estimate the sample size, formula for calculating the
minimum sample size for estimating the proportion was used. According to this formula, 380 nurses were selected
as sample size. A questionnaire was used to collect data. For this purpose, the researchers distributed the pre-
designed questionnaires among the nurses in different wards of the hospital in three working shifts. Before filling
the questionnaires, the objectives and importance of study were explained and the security and confidentiality of the
information were assured. The data collection tool was the researcher made questionnaire which was designed based
on previous similar studies (2, 13). For validity of this tool, the experts’ opinions including three faculty members in
medical informatics field and six nursing supervisors were used. Also, to examine the validity of the questionnaire,
Cronbach’s alpha was used, and its value was about 0.94. This questionnaire has two parts. The first part included
the demographic information of the nurses such as age, gender, educational degree, job title, work experience in the
healthcare environment, and experience with HIS. The second part included 34 questions about the challenges of
using HIS in five dimensions including system characteristics, human factors, human environment, organizational
environment and the hardware factors. The participants answered the questions based on the 5-point Likert scale
from very high to never. Each answer was scored from 1 (very high) to 5 (never). The data analysis was done by

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SPSS version 19 software. In order to analyze the collected data, descriptive statistic, t-test and ANOVA test were
used.

3. Results
Of the population, 380 were selected as sample size. The questionnaires were distributed between the samples and
finally, due to the lack of participation of some nurses in the study, 272 questionnaires were filled. Out of 272
participants, 210 nurses (77%) were working in academic hospitals and 62 nurses (23%) were working in the non-
academic hospitals. In total, 192 participants (91.5%) were women and 18 nurses (8.5%) were men in academic
hospitals. Of nurses working in non-academic hospitals 48 (77.5%) were women and 14 (22.5%) were men. Age of
the participants in both hospitals was 20 to 60 years old. In academic hospitals 178 (85%) and in non-academic
hospitals 51 nurses (82%) had bachelor’s degree and others had associate and master’s degree (Table 1).

Table 1. Demographic information of participating nurses

Characteristics Academic hospitals; n Non academic hospitals; n
(%) (%)
Gender Male 18 (8.5) 14 (22.5)
Female 192 (91.5) 48 (77.5)
Age (year) 20-29 62 (29.5) 32 (51.5)
30-39 69 (33) 23 (37)
40-49 66 (32) 6 (10)
50-60 12 (5.5) 1 (1.5)
Educational degree Associate 24 (11) 10 (16)
Bachelor 178 (85) 51 (82)
Master 8 (4) 1 (2)
Job title Nurse's aide 27 (13) 10 (16)
Nurse 158 (75) 43 (69.5)
Head nurse 21 (10) 8 (13)
Supervisor 2 (1) 1 (1.5)
Matron 2 (1) 0 (0)
Work experience in the healthcare Under 1 11 (5) 7 (11)
environment (year) 1-2 22 (10.5) 8 (13)
2-4 40 (19) 19 (30.5)
5-10 54 (25.5) 21 (34)
11-15 16 (7.5) 5 (8)
Over 15 67 (32.5) 2 (3.5)
Experience with HIS (year) Under 1 17 (8) 11 (17.5)
1-2 41 (19.5) 12 (19.5)
2-4 73 (35) 26 (42)
Over 5 79 (37.5) 13 (21)

Out of the studied challenges, the challenges related to human environment with total mean score of 3.34 had the
highest score. The results of data analysis by separating hospital type (academic and non-academic) showed that the
challenges related to human environment had the highest mean (3.33) in the academic hospitals. The challenges
related to human factors in non-academic hospitals had the highest mean score (3.5). In the category of human
environment, the highest mean score (3.4) was related to “negative attitude of society toward using HIS” and in the
category of human factors, “lack of incentive to use system” had the highest mean score (3.63). In total, hardware
factors had the lowest mean score (3.05, 2.66 and 2.75) in both types of hospitals. Generally, the lowest mean score
was related to “technical problems of system” (2.35) in both types of hospitals (Table 2). The results of t-test
showed significant relationship between the gender of the participants and the mean score of challenges of
organizational environment in the academic hospitals (p<0.05). So that, men were more agreed that the
organizational environment barriers play an important role in the implementation of HIS. In addition, there was a
significant relationship between being familiar with the HIS and the mean score assigned to human environment
factors in the academic hospitals, .i.e. those who were not familiar to HIS, acknowledged human factors less than
other factors as a barrier to use HIS. The results of ANOVA in both groups revealed that there is no significant
relationship between demographic information of the participants (age, job, educational degree, work experience in

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the healthcare environment and experience with HIS) and the mean scores of challenges in hospitals. But, there was
a significant relationship between the educational degree and working experience in the healthcare environment and
the mean score assigned to hardware challenges in the academic hospitals. So that, the participants with lower
educational degree stated hardware challenges as a barrier to use HIS. Also, the participants with higher working
experience in the healthcare environment stated hardware challenges as barriers to use HIS. Additionally, there was
a significant relationship between experience with HIS and the mean score assigned to human challenges. Therefore,
participants with higher experiences with HIS were more interested and motivated to use these systems.

Table 2. Scores related to barriers of using hospital information system in terms of hospital type
Dimensions Criteria Mean score
Academic Non-academic
hospital hospital
System Technical problems of system 2.35 2.35
characteristics Incompatibility of user interface with users needs 2.72 2.82
System incompatibility with workflows in manual system 2.84 2.79
Difficulty to work with system 3.17 3.27
Non-compliance of system with the previous electronic 3.20 2.97
systems
Low speed of computer 2.49 2.74
Possibility of legal problems when working with system 2.98 3.02
Loss of confidentiality of information 2.85 3.35
Display of unnecessary information in system 3.01 3.56
Inappropriateness of some default information 2.94 3.29
Difficulty of access to information 3 3.42
Security threat of information 3 3.16
Human factors Time consuming work with HIS 3.20 3.37
Lack of interest to work with computer 3.29 3.44
Lack of sufficient skill for working with computer 3.15 3.53
Lack of knowledge about the functionality of system 3.14 3.50
Resistance to change from manual systems to 3.37 3.45
computerized systems
Uncertainty about the usefulness of system 3.25 3.58
No incentive to use system 3.46 3.63
Human environment Reduced communication with patients 3.25 3.32
Reduced communication with colleagues 3.30 3.45
Negative attitude of colleagues toward HIS 3.38 3.27
Negative attitude of society toward using HIS 3.40 3.61
Organizational Lack of time under clinical work pressure 2.74 2.84
environment Inadequate training about HIS 2.69 2.92
Failure to fix the system completely 2.80 2.82
Lack of space in workplace 2.78 3.06
Lack of user participation in the design of system before 2.87 3.06
installation
Non-compliance with organizational culture 3.13 3.50
Lack of computer’s staff when necessary 2.51 3.16
Incorrect managerial decision making in hospital 3.04 3.50
Hardware factors Network failure 2.50 2.92
Lack of computers in hospitals 2.83 3.18

4. Discussion
The results of this study revealed the challenges and the barriers of using HIS implementation from the perspective
of nurses working in academic and non-academic hospitals. In the academic hospitals, the most common and
important challenges were related to the human environment factors and in the non-academic hospitals the issues
concerning the human factors were the common and important challenges. Among the human environment factors,

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the highest mean score was related to “negative attitude of society toward using HIS” and among the human factors
“no incentive to use system” had a higher mean score. The results of this study revealed that the nurses in the
academic hospitals stated the negative attitude of society toward using HIS as the largest challenges. While, in the
studies conducted by Ahmadian et al. (2), on the challenges of the HIS from the perspective of authorities of
information technology department and the hospital managers, hardware factors and “network failure” have been
stated as the most important challenges in using these systems. The difference in the results can be due to
differences in the field and expertise of participants of these two studies. Because, computer engineers in the
information technology department are more involved with the hardware and software problems problems related to
network of the HIS and subsequently, they are responsible for solving these issues. However, nurses and other
experts in the healthcare sector interact with patients directly, and are the final users of information systems,
therefore they are further involved with systems and recording information and the related issues to information
(14). The studies highlighted the role of the main users (15) and also society’s attitude (16) in convincing nurses to
use the HIS. The negative attitude about the systems is more likely due to earliest models of these systems, the lower
speed, personnel’s unawareness and anxiety about the safety and legal issues. In order to reduce these conflicts, the
active participation of the final users in designing and developing HIS and in-service training, can be a suitable
solution for this problem. In the non-academic hospitals, the majority of the nurses stated the human factors, and
among those “no incentive to use system” was the main challenge to use the information systems. The basic salary
of nurses in the non-academic hospitals is lower than academic and governmental hospitals; therefore, financial
motivation plays an important role in this regard (17). Some policies such as payment based on performance pattern
(Qasedak) implemented in the governmental hospitals, despite some opponents, has urged the nurses to document all
the services in the ward to calculate their salary. The hardware factors from the perspective of nurses in two
hospitals had lower priority as the challenge in using the HIS. While in the previous studies, the technological
factors such as the software and hardware factors were reported as the most important barriers (2, 18). This
difference in results is more likely because of the differences in study population. Lack of computers in hospitals
was introduced as one of the main barrier of hardware factors category. This shortcoming causes some difficulties
for nurses to access HIS, and this affects the information entry and time of patients caring. This also leads to
decrease nurses' motivation to use these systems. Matching information systems and workload of nurses, and adding
the functionalities to facilitate their performance will result in increasing users’ satisfaction (19). Given the current
policies of hospitals to create electronic files beside paper files caused an increase in the workload of nurses,
especially in clinical departments. In-service training and paying a salary based on performance have increased the
awareness and motivation of nurses, and finally resulted in promotion of HIS. The major limitation of this study was
lack of cooperation of some nurses to fill the questionnaire. This study is the first study which reveals the challenges
and barriers of using HIS implementation from a perspective of nurses in two different types of hospitals.

5. Conclusions
In summary and according to findings of this study, the most common challenges of using information systems in
academic hospitals were related to human environment factors. Also, human factors were the most important
challenges in the non-academic hospitals. The results of this study can provide effective suggestions to authorities
and managers of hospitals, from the perspective of nurses as the most important users of the systems in the
healthcare sector, regarding the barriers and challenges of using HIS to solve the problems and implement HIS
successfully. It is recommended to use some policies and programs such as in-service training to solve these
barriers, and to increase the motivation of users of HIS. This study examined the challenges of using information
systems from the perspective of nurses. In order to increase the use of these systems, it is required to conduct other
studies on the influencing factors on increasing motivation and interests of nurses to use these systems.

Acknowledgments:
We appreciate all the nurses who dedicated their time and expertise for doing this study. In addition, we appreciate
the medical informatics research center of the Kerman University of Medical Sciences for supporting us with
research grant No.93.11.

Conflict of Interest:
There is no conflict of interest to be declared.

Authors' contributions:
All authors contributed to this article equally. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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