Physicians' Experiences of EHR Technical Quality: Results from Four Large Cross-Sectional Surveys in 2010-2021

Unexpected downtime and long response times of electronic health record (EHR) systems not only impact user satisfaction and clinicians' work efficiency but also bring about potential harm for patients. Despite improvements in the performance of EHR systems' architecture, hardware, and networks, technical challenges continue to cause problems. We explored the end-user experiences of EHR technical functionality and quality from four large national cross-sectional surveys conducted among Finnish physicians in 2010-21. The results were analyzed by healthcare sector/specialty groups. In most groups, the experiences of stability and reaction speed became worse in 2010-17, which is readily explained by the implementation of the national patient data repository services, but improvements were seen in 2021, suggesting that EHR vendors have solved at least some of the slowness problems. The proportion of physicians reporting having experienced faulty system function with potential or actualized harm for the patient had decreased in operative and medical specialties and in the private sector but remained stable in other groups. Our findings underline the importance of continuing to develop technical qualities - including the implementations of national integrations.