title: "Physicians' Adoption Score" - physicians are not a homogenous group.
abstract: The issue of "Physicians' Adoption" is one of the big challenges facing wide-scale implementation of electronic health records (EHRs). An important question is why the number of physicians using EHRs in their practice has not reached the level expected. While this issue has been addressed widely in the literature, the term "physicians" is used generally to encompass a broad range of roles and responsibilities. Physicians are not a homogeneous group and, without a good understanding of the differences among physicians, it is not logical or feasible to come up with a universal blue print devised to convince all physicians to accept an EHR implementation in their practices. First we discuss the barriers to implementing an EHR based on the characteristics of different types of physicians and then introduce an "Adoption Score" for physicians and provide a tool to measure the barriers. We discuss the importance of this scoring system and how similar methods can be helpful to assign an adoption score at an organizational level.
authors.affiliation: School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, BC, Canada.
authors.forename: Mitra
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sajedi
authors.forename: Andre W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Kushniruk
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001292:Attitude to Computers; D004059:Diffusion of Innovation; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008875:Middle Aged; D010820:Physicians