The impact of office-related metrics on meeting physician expectations from Electronic Medical Record systems

Meeting expectations is a proxy for satisfaction. With the widely used Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, the focus should be on whether they meet the expectations of healthcare workers and physicians. Data from a quantitative survey amongst physicians, not practices, on adopting EMR systems are analyzed with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), K-means (K = 2) cluster analysis, and Binary Logistic Regression. The goal is to understand what factors influence meeting expectations and if these parameters are sufficient to predict the physicians’ positive or negative experiences. A path diagram shows that office-related metrics (staff skills, training, and the system’s ease of use) are the largest determinant of meeting expectations as experienced by the physicians. Two clusters centered around opposite negative and positive answers from physicians on the quality of the systems were found. The clusters provide a considerable increase in accuracy compared with the baseline in classifying positive against negative responses on meeting expectations. Physicians value the impact of EMR systems on the practice and personnel more than their own experience. We conclude medical practices should be aware of the difficulties their staff may face before implementing and during the use of EMR systems.