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Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Adopting Electronic Medical Record-Based Reporting Systems for Notifiable Disease Surveillance: A Quantitative Analysis

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Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to greater attention being given to infectious disease surveillance systems and their notification functionalities. Although numerous studies have explored the benefits of integrating functionalities with electronic medical record (EMR) systems, empirical studies on the topic are rare. The current study assessed which factors influence the effectiveness of EMR-based reporting systems (EMR-RSs) for notifiable disease surveillance. This study interviewed staff from hospitals with a coverage that represented 51.39% of the notifiable disease reporting volume in Taiwan. Exact logistic regression was employed to determine which factors influenced the effectiveness of Taiwan’s EMR-RS. The results revealed that the influential factors included hospitals’ early participation in the EMR-RS project, frequent consultation with the information technology (IT) provider of the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (TWCDC), and retrieval of data from at least one internal database. They also revealed that using an EMR-RS resulted in more timely, accurate, and convenient reporting in hospitals. In addition, developing by an internal IT unit instead of outsourcing EMR-RS development led to more accurate and convenient reporting. Automatically loading the required data enhanced the convenience, and designing input fields that may be unavailable in current databases to enable physicians to add data to legacy databases also boosted effectiveness of the reporting system.

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Data Availability

The datasets used during the current study are not publicly available, as stipulated in our participant consent forms. However, they are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Kuan-Chia Lin for enhancing the quality of the statistical analysis, as well as Daniel Shaw and Wallace Academic Editing for their assistance in proofreading and editing, respectively.

Funding

This research did not receive any grants from public, commercial, or nonprofit funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Care Management, National Taipei University of Nursing and Health Science, Taipei, 112303, Taiwan

    Li-Hui Lee, Wan-Nin Chen, Chi-Ming Chang, Ean-Wen Huang & Ding-Ping Liu

  2. Centers for Disease Control, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taipei, 100008, Taiwan

    Jen-Hsiang Chuang & Jiunn-Shyan Wu

  3. Department of Medical Research, Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, 710402, Taiwan

    Yu-Cih Wu

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  1. Li-Hui Lee
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Contributions

Li-Hui Lee is responsible for the conception and design of the study, acquisition of data, interpretation of data, and drafting of the article. Yu-Cih Wu and Wan-Nin Chen were in charge of contacting the interviewees and acquiring and analyzing data. Jiunn-Shyan Wu and Ean-Wen Huang assisted in the study’s initiation and data acquisition. Jiunn-Shyan Wu also help to contact interviewees. Ding-Ping Liu and Chi-Ming Chang initiated the study, the conception, and the design of the study. Ding-Ping Liu and Jen-Hsiang Chuang also revised the article critically for relevant intellectual content.All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ding-Ping Liu.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors claim no conflicts of interest. The study results are based on the responses of interviewees who participated in the EMR-RS project and are from hospitals and of their related information system providers in Taiwan. The interpretations and conclusions presented herein do not represent those of the TWCDC.

Ethical Approval

This study was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the TWCDC (IRB no. 106207).

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individuals involved in the study.

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Lee, LH., Chuang, JH., Wu, YC. et al. Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Adopting Electronic Medical Record-Based Reporting Systems for Notifiable Disease Surveillance: A Quantitative Analysis. J Med Syst 47, 70 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-023-01971-y

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