Students’ perceptions on their use of an EHR: pilot questionnaire study

INTRODUCTION: Many clinical education programmes have not incorporated the use of the electronic health record (EHR) into their curriculum. It is important to incorporate technologies that will be used in real-world settings to better prepare students for clinical practice. OBJECTIVES: To undertake a review of literature to identify a training evaluation framework; to conduct a self-completion survey, pretraining and post-training, to determine students’ perceptions on the benefit of using EHR training system. SETTING: Nursing School, University, North West England, UK; University Ethic Committee Approval Received. PARTICIPANTS: Registered nurses undertaking a validated return to practice course; 24 participants for the first cohort who completed pretraining questionnaire and 23 for the second post-training cohort. RESULTS: The statistical results show that the students perceived that the training improved their capability in employing digital systems with statistically significant difference in the assessed preproficiency and post proficiency in the use of digital clinical systems (premedians and post medians are 2 and 5 on 10-point Likert scale, p=0.041). There was also an indication of an improvement in the knowledge of EHR systems although not statistically significant. Most students perceived it increased their knowledge on digital systems. CONCLUSION: Students perceived an increase in proficiency with the EHR. There was evidence of improvement in confidence in the use of the EHR, but this confidence would be enhanced by additional use of the system. Some desire to increase confidence further and to develop knowledge of digital systems was expressed.