“Impact of Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) on Emergency Departments in Palestinian Governmental Hospitals رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

PACS has been recently adopted in governmental hospitals in Palestine. PACS is considered one of the most important new healthcare technologies that improve patient health care, allowing medical images to be stored, retrieved, transmitted, and displayed in a hospital or health system's many sites. In Arab countries, there is very small number of studies and in Palestine it’s the first study that measures the acceptance level of PACS. By using technology acceptance model TAM, the impact of PACS in emergency departments in governmental hospitals user's acceptance level of PACS is investigated. Even the best and most expensive IT system will be rendered ineffective if its users resist it, so the user's acceptance is important to the success of PACS implementations in healthcare organizations. Purpose of the study The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of picture archiving and communication system (PACS) on emergency departments in Palestinian governmental hospitals. Methods of the study The study was descriptive cross-sectional design. Twelve governmental hospitals in Palestine were included in the study. All physicians who work in emergency departments participated in the study (160 physicians). The study is quantitative and surveyed user’s VII (physicians) perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors toward using PACS by using a questionnaire. Data were analyzed using the IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. One hundred and thirty five out of 160 questionnaires were completed and returned to the researcher (response rate 84.37%). The results revealed that using PACS has made physicians job easier to perform (mean=4.20). Using PACS enables to accomplish tasks more quickly (mean=4.19). PACS has improved the quality of work in providing better patient care (mean=4.19). Learning to use the PACS has been easy (mean=4.10). PACS made the physicians practice less stressful, easy, pleasant and interesting, it recommends using PACS to other emergency departments (mean=4.39). In addition, descriptive statistics showed that overall acceptance level was of a Moderate degree with mean (3.11). Correlation analysis showed that there is positive statistically significance between PU, PEU, Change as total score and Acceptance. Multiple regressions showed that the highest influencing factor was change factor. ANOVA test showed that no impact on the overall acceptance from socio-demographic variables. TAM model was used to evaluate the impact of PACS on emergency departments and to measure the user's acceptance for this system. User's acceptance is an important factor in the success of healthcare IT adoption and implementation. As a result, PACS is recommended system from the point of view of emergency physicians. The overall acceptance level was of a Moderate degree, change factor was the highest influencing factor, PACS made the physicians practice less stressful, easy, pleasant VIII and interesting, and they considered it easy to use the system which improves the quality of their work leading to better patient care. Finally, the impact of PACS on emergency departments work practice is positive effect and it improves patient health care in general.