Paperless anaesthesia : perspectives from anaesthetists in public hospitals in Hong Kong

Abstract

Surgery is an important part of our health care system in relieving various disease burdens. Therefore, optimal surgical and anaesthesia cares are keys to maintain the public health, especially in resources limited public health care system in Hong Kong. As electronic anaesthetic management systems were shown to be able to improve the quality of perioperative anaesthetic care, it is predicted that substantial direct and indirect benefits to our community can be achieved by the computerization. However, fully implementation of paperless anaesthesia in Hong Kong is still far from complete. The objective of this survey is to investigate the incentives and barriers of the computerization of the anaesthesia record and management systems from the perspectives of anaesthetists working in public sector in Hong Kong. A self-completed, four-sectioned questionnaire was sent to 436 anaesthetists working in public hospitals in Hong Kong. Information including gender, age group, seniority and working experience of respondents, status of computerization in their corresponding institutions, respondents’ attitudes on electronic preoperative or intraoperative and postoperative systems (through two identical sets of 17 statements designated according to technology acceptance model, rated by a five-point scale system) and their preferred or non-preferred features in the electronic systems were collected and analysed. A total of 181 responses was received (response rate = 41.5%). Improved accessibility of patient information and ability to collect data for audit and research were shown to be the main incentives according to the results, while the worry of lengthening the time needed for task completion was demonstrated to be the main barrier to the computerization. This survey has provided unique evidence regarding the attitudes of anaesthetists in public sector on computerization of anaesthesia systems. The result could be employed in order to facilitate the future computerization of anaesthesia systems in the public sector. To understand the related issue in private sector and promotion of paperless anaesthesia in this locality, further study is needed to investigate on the attitudes of anaesthetists working in private system.