E-health readiness assessment from EHR perspective inThai Binh General Hospital, Vietnam

Abstract

Objective: To describe the current electronic health for patient registry and insurance in the Thai Binh Hospital; to assess the opinions of system users in terms of current use of the e - health system within the hospital; to assess readiness for full-functioned electronic health record (EHR) application system in Thai Binh hospital. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Thai Binh Hospital, Vietnam. In-depth interviews were conducted to collect ideas from the director of the hospital and managers of departments at the hospital. The quantitative information was collected by using questionnaire to access e-health/EHR readiness among all health workers who work at hospital. The readiness in this study includes: core readiness, technological readiness, learning readiness and societal readiness. All items were measured on five-point Likert scale. The satisfaction of e-health/EHR was also assessed. Results: The leaders realized the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) in healthcare. IT skills of doctors and nurses are limited. The Internet system is slow, and the performance quality was poor. The ICT infrastructure for the deployment of E-health/EHR applications generally is sufficient. However, to implement full-function EHR, the hospital needs to develop more software and improve its ICT infrastructure.