Abstract
BackgroundElectronic Health Records (EHRs) are now widely used to create a single, shared, and reliable source of patient data throughout healthcare organizations. However, health professionals continue to experience mismatches between their working practices and what the EHR allows or directs them to do. Health professionals adopt working practices other than those imposed by the EHR to overcome such mismatches, known as workarounds. Our study aims to inductively develop a typology of enduring EHR workarounds and explore their consequences by answering the question: What types of EHR workarounds persist, and what are the user-perceived consequences?MethodsThis single case study was conducted within the Internal Medicine department of a Dutch hospital that had implemented an organization-wide, commercial EHR system over two years ago. Data were collected through observations of six EHR users (see Additional file 1, observation scheme) and 17 semi-structured interviews with physicians, nurses, administrators, and EHR support staff members. Documents were analysed to contextualize these data (see Additional file 2, interview protocol).ResultsThrough a qualitative analysis, 11 workarounds were identified, predominantly performed by physicians. These workarounds are categorized into three types either performed while working with the system (in-system workflow sequence workarounds and in-system data entry workarounds) or bypassing the system (out-system workarounds). While these workarounds seem to offer short-term benefits for the performer, they often create threats for the user, the patient, the overall healthcare organization, and the system.ConclusionThis study increases our understanding of the enduring phenomenon of working around Electronic Health Records by presenting a typology of those workarounds that persist after adoption and by reflecting on the user-perceived risks and benefits. The typology helps EHR users and their managers to identify enduring types of workarounds and differentiate between the harmful and less harmful ones. This distinction can inform their decisions to discourage or obviate the need for certain workarounds, while legitimating others.
Highlights
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are widely used to create a single, shared, and reliable source of patient data throughout healthcare organizations
Our study aims to offer a typology of persisting EHR workarounds geared to exploring the consequences per distinguished type
The findings reveal a distinction between workarounds used while working within the system and workarounds that are used through means other than the EHR to supplement or bypass the system’s practices
Summary
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are widely used to create a single, shared, and reliable source of patient data throughout healthcare organizations. Health professionals continue to experience mismatches between their working practices and what the EHR allows or directs them to do. Health professionals adopt working practices other than those imposed by the EHR to overcome such mismatches, known as workarounds. We adopt the following definition of EHR workarounds: ‘workarounds are behaviors that may differ from organizationally prescribed or intended procedures. They circumvent or temporarily ‘fix’ an evident or perceived workflow hindrance in order to meet a goal or to achieve it more readily’ [7, p.2]. Examining the relations between types of workarounds and their consequences is an area in urgent need of additional research [12], for the reasons outlined below
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