The need for a thoughtful deployment strategy: evaluating clinicians' perceptions of critical deployment issues

This paper presents data collected from 899 clinicians across three Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers where existing terminal-based architecture was being replaced with client-server architecture. Surveys were conducted with physicians (n = 184), nurses (n = 355) and other clinicians (n = 360) gathering user characteristics and their perceptions of five deployment issues (e.g. adequacy of technical and institutional support and perceptions of the soon-to-be-implemented clinical workstation). Mean scores for the five deployment issues for all clinicians indicates perceptions are somewhat neutral. However, when data is analyzed according to job classification, significant (p = 0.05) differences in perceptions were noted among groups of clinicians (e.g., physicians and registered nurses). Results of analyzing data grouped by VA site (n = 3) indicates significant (p = 0.05) differences exist among sites in clinicians' perceptions of the deployment issues. A thoughtful deployment strategy including an in-depth assessment of clinician users by job classification and by location may produce important information, critical to the successful deployment of new technologies, in very large health management institutions.