Patient and family engagement with hospital electronic systems: Juggling for co-existence.

Abstract

Worldwide, the adoption and dissemination of electronic systems has become widespread in many facets of health care. There has been rapid development of diverse technological solutions that address health care needs and a growing recognition by policy makers that technology has a central role to play in addressing key challenges in health (Wickramasinghe and Schaffer, 2010). Within hospitals, these electronic systems take many forms, including electronic prescribing, computerised provider order entry systems, computerised decision support systems, and picture archiving and communication systems (Haux et al., 2013). Adjuvants to electronic systems are also extensively used, including e-mails, pagers, secure messaging systems, and mobile phones with applications (Black et al., 2015). To support their development, implementation, integration and evaluation, governments are investing enormously to replace paper-based systems with electronic systems within health care environments. For example, in Australia, approximately $A1.6 billion were allocated from 2012 to 2016 to enable the adoption of e-health initiatives (Cripps et al., 2012).