Literature Review and Synthesis: Existing Surveys of Health Information Technology, Including Surveys on Health Information Technology in Nursing Homes and Home Health

摘要

In an effort to better understand the current use and adoption rates of electronic health records and other health information technology (HIT) applications within nursing homes, the Division of Health Care Policy and Research at the University of Colorado Denver has been contracted by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop survey instruments for use in long-term care provider settings. Although numerous survey instruments have been fielded to assess HIT use in nursing homes and long-term care settings, the lack of consistent definitions, terminology, item construction, sampling frames, and measurement criteria render it difficult to accurately gauge current HIT adoption. In this report, we review existing surveys for long-term care and other provider settings pertaining to current HIT use and adoption, barriers to adoption, and recommend issues to consider when developing survey questions to ascertain HIT adoption, use, and barriers to adoption and use in nursing homes. Section I of the deliverable discusses current trends and policy initiatives in HIT for long-term care. Section II summarizes several existing surveys on HIT use and adoption in long-term care settings, compares key findings of the surveys, and discusses measurement issues affecting survey results. Surveys used to assess HIT use and adoption in home health and hospice organizations, ambulatory or physician practices, and hospitals are discussed in Section III to determine if survey items and techniques from other settings could be used in long-term care. The descriptions of survey characteristics and findings were drawn from published papers or web-accessible information. The comparison of survey findings presented in Section II and Section III highlights the assertion that lack of consistency with regard to data items and measurement methods hinders efforts to draw meaningful conclusions from published survey results.