Lack of Training for a Downtime Procedure: End User's Perceptions of an Electronic Health Record Contingency Plan

The implementation of an Electronic Health Record has many benefits; but when it is not available, it can impact patient continuity of care. If there is no support, or a failure to guarantee the continuity of services, contingency plans have to be implemented to overcome the information disruption. End users are in direct contact with the information system, and are responsible for documenting patient clinical information. Focusing on them, we propose the design, development, and validation of a survey to evaluate the beliefs, knowledge, and perceptions of end users, about the Electronic Health Record contingency plan. Preliminary results showed that even when there were less downtime periods, end users perceived that they did not have adequate training or information about how to go through the downtime event.