Recognizing patient safety importance through instrument validation on physicians' assessment of an EHR

Patient safety and high quality patient care are critical concerns for healthcare providers. The Institute of Medicine report suggests medical errors account for up to 98,000 patient deaths each year. Therefore, the US healthcare system is looking to information technology applications as one means of making patient care safer. This paper compares the psychometric properties of the Electronic Health Record Nurse Satisfaction instrument (based on the Health Information Technology Research-based Evaluation Framework) to our study that employed the same instrument but measured clinical physicians' opinions of an EHR to determine if the instrument could be used across domains of users. Our results found the factor analysis and the clustering of the sub-scale items were different. We propose a two-factorial instrument that identifies the following dimensions: System Features/Performance and Data Quality/Accuracy. Another important contribution of this study is that patient safety was identified as a more salient indicator for physicians.