Top Barriers and Facilitators to Nurses' PDA Adoption

Top Barriers and Facilitators to Nurses’ PDA Adoption+

Yen-Chiao Lu, RN, MS/MBA∗, Yan Xiao, PhD♦, Mary Etta Mills, ScD, RN, FAAN*, Karen Soeken, PhD*, Vinay Vaidya, MD♦ ∗ University of Maryland School of Nursing, ♦University of Maryland School of Medicine ABSTRACT: A web-based survey was employed to identify barriers and facilitators to nurses’ PDA adoption. Based on the top barriers and facilitators identified, implications for PDA manufacturers and hospitals are discussed.

INTRODUCTION The use of handheld computers or personal digital assistants (PDAs) in healthcare has become more and more popular in the past few years.(1) PDAs are currently used to assist members of the healthcare team by providing portability and access to information.(2-3) To understand how PDAs are utilized in healthcare, we conducted a Web-based survey to examine top barriers and facilitators to nurses’ PDA adoption.

METHODOLOGY Using a survey developed and posted on the web, respondents were asked to choose barriers and facilitators from a list (30 barriers and 22 facilitators) developed by the researchers. A convenience sampling method was used to recruit the participants. An invitation letter was posted on a nursing informatics listserv (approximate 900 members) and sent to the participants of a nursing informatics conference (about 400 attendees). The total number of recipients was estimated to be 1,300. The data was collected in November and December 2005.

RESULTS Three hundred and thirteen responses (24%) were collected. A total of 276 valid responses were analyzed (14% male & 86% female). The majority of the respondents were between 41 to 55 years old. About 30% of the respondents were informatics nurses, 20% were staff nurses and 16% were nurse practitioners. Half (52%) of the respondents owned or used a Palm OS based PDA whereas 23% were Pocket PC users. About 50% of the respondents indicated that they carried the device all the time and 25% carried it most of the time. The top barriers and six facilitators are summarized in Tables 1 & 2.

CONCLUSIONS Top barriers and facilitators show two distinct categories: physical design of the device and organizational support. The results have potential implications for both manufacturers (hardware designers) and hospital organizations. All five facilitators and three of the top barriers identified can be addressed by making changes in physical design (such as increasing battery capacity and screen size and adding wireless connectivity, expandable memory slot, and anti-theft module etc.). Lack of support, network infrastructure and integrated hospital information system required extensive institutional commitments from the hospitals. More research is recommended to study the effects of organizational support on adoption of handheld technology. Table 1. Top five facilitators: Top Facilitators Longer battery life Expandable memory Larger screen size Internet access Anti-theft design (e.g. finger-print reader…etc)

N (%) 163 (59.06 %) 144 (52.17 %) 137 (49.63 %) 132 (47.82 %) 110 (39.86 %)

Table 2. Top barriers: Top Barriers Lack of integrated hospital information system Lack of support at work Lack of network infrastructure at work Short battery life Lack of wireless connectivity Small screen size

N (%) 100 (36.23 %) 94 (34.06 %) 91 (32.97 %) 91 (32.97 %) 88 (31.88 %) 85 (30.80 %)

REFERENCES 1.

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Baumgart DC. Personal digital assistants in health care: experienced clinicians in the palm of your hand? Lancet 2005 Oct 1;366(9492):1210-22. Lu Y, Xiao Y, Sears A, Jacko JA. A review and a framework of handheld computer adoption in healthcare. Int J Med Inform 2005 Jun;74(5):409-22. Lu Y, Xiao Y, Sears A, Jacko JA, Charters K. Why don’t physicians use their Personal Digital Assistants? AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2003:405-4.

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Supported by National Science Foundation (0121570). The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of NSF.

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