Adoption of unified electronic health record in Saudi Arabia: The residents perspective

Abstract

The government of Saudi Arabia has been working on the development of eHealth in the country which includes, the move from paper-based health records to Electronic Health Records (EHR). But, the implementation of EHR in the country is not much progressed. The present paper aims to measure adopting a unified electronic health record in Saudi Arabia from the resident's perspective. The descriptive study was conducted by the survey method in Saudi Arabia. The primary data was collected using a structured questionnaire. Self-administered online questionnaires were distributed to 300 respondents in various provinces via social media over a period of three months. The study used a Convenient Sampling technique and received 158 valid questionnaires from the respondents with a response rate of 58.66%. The data were analyzed using SAS version 0.4. The results show that 98.07% of the male participants and 88.88% of the female respondents were expressed their acceptance towards the adoption of EHR at the national level, whereas 68.26% of the male and 66.66% of the female respondents were expressed their acceptance at the global level. The study conducted the Logistic Regression and found no statistically significant differences between the gender, region, and education level of the respondents and acceptance of adoption of unified EHR at the national and global level. The study found that Saudi Arabia residents are supporting the adoption of unified EHR at both national and global levels. The findings are useful for policymakers to understand the people’s perceptions about the adoption of unified EHR in the country.