Navigating Digital Tools in Hospitals: Practical Recommendations for New Users from a Qualitative Interview Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digitalization of medical practices is an integral part of clinician’s daily life making it vital for medical practitioners to understand and effectively utilize digital tools in hospital settings. However, often clinicians express a lack of preparedness for their digital work environments. Especially new clinical end users, encompassing medical and nursing students, seasoned professionals transitioning to new healthcare environments, and experienced practitioners encountering new healthcare technologies, face critically intense learning periods with often lack of adequate time for learning digital tools, resulting in difficulties in integrating and adopting these into clinical practice. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to comprehensively collect advice from experienced healthcare professionals to guide new clinical end users on how to initiate their engagement with health information technologies within hospital settings. METHODS We conducted qualitative interviews with 52 healthcare professionals across Switzerland, representing 24 medical specialties from 14 hospitals, and performed inductive thematic analysis. RESULTS Ten themes emerged from the interview data, including 1) digital tool understanding, 2) peer-based learning strategies, 3) experimental learning approaches, 4) knowledge exchange and support, 5) training approaches, 6) innovative thinking, 7) the personal attitude towards technology, 8) critical thinking approaches, 9) dealing with emotions, and 10) the human focus. Subsequent ten recommendations with specific advice to new clinical end users on how to approach new healthcare technologies include 1) taking time to get to know and understand the tools you are working with, 2) proactively ask experienced colleagues, 3) simply try it out and practice, 4) know where to get help and information, 5) take sufficient training, 6) stay curious and think outside the box, 7) stay open-minded, 8) remain critically thinking and use your knowledge base, 9) overcome your fears, 10) never lose the human focus. CONCLUSIONS Our study emphasized the importance of comprehensive training and learning approaches for healthcare technologies based on the advice and recommendations of experienced healthcare professionals. Moreover, these recommendations have implications for medical educators and clinical instructors, advising on effective methods to instruct and support new end users, enabling them to proficiently utilize novel technologies. Therefore, we advocate for new clinical end users as well as medical educators to prioritize effective training and cultivating technological readiness to optimize information technology use in healthcare.