Study the effect of hospital information systems (HIS) on communication improvement and service quality among nursing staff

Failure in communication and information exchange among healthcare personnel can cause cooperative and coordinative problems among them, which finally increases chances of error and decreases the quality of patient care. If Hospital Information Systems (HIS) modifies the work routines and communication pattern among the personnel of different wards, they can play a significant role in providing the patients' safety. The goal of this study is to investigate the HIS's effect on nursing stuff communications in different wards and finally on healthcare quality ş. Method: Two years after installation of HIS in Urmia's Shahid Motahari Hospital, a questionnaire was designed to investigate the nurse users' view about the HIS. After reliability and validity of the questionnaire were measured, it was distributed among 150 nurses working in the admission wards of the hospital. From among the questions of the questionnaire, 6 questions were aimed at measuring the major and minor effects of the system on the nurses' important work communications and the major effect of the system on the accuracy of their routine tasks was assessed through one question. A 5-point Likert scale was considered in all of the questions. ANOVA tests were used to analyze the data collected from the questions. The study was an analytic descriptive research. Findings: A significant enhancement has been reported by nurses in total index of communication between different parts of hospital (60%) and basic indexes, including ease of accessing to patients' information (test results, radiology, etc.) (69.3%); following-up test results (78%); gathering of discharging information (58.6%); sending orders to laboratory (60%); and following-up prescribed medicine (58%) (p<0.05). Furthermore, in 60 percent of cases a positive effect on enhancing accuracy in doing routine tasks has been reported (p<0.05).Conclusion: Our study showed that hospital information system enhancing communication between nurses and increasing accuracy in their routine tasks causes development in nurses' work flow, decreasing probability of mistake, and rising in patient healthcare quality.