Table 1 Pre-implementation semi-structured interview illustrative quotes categorized by theme

Awareness and understanding of electronic medical record

“Everything will go in it. So, basically, instead of writing in the notes and ticking boxes I’m going to be clicking through boxes on a computer. That’s the way I understand it.”

“I think the old record will sort of phase out and new record will basically supersede that and also the paper record will be gone, so the EMR will just replace the paper record. That’s my understanding, yeah”

“it is going to be an Electronic Medical Record that will be used for patient care and also simultaneously generate data that can be used for quality improvement and research.”

“I’m hoping that it would be a more complete dataset. I don’t have to wait for admin staff to complete the data. It will be more prospectively data collection, because clinicians, I think it’s my understanding that when EMR will be up running, clinicians will be doing lots of data entry, that’s the expectation.”

“I think it will mean that I will have a better understanding about the patient when they’re on the phone, so that I can make valid and informed, give them informed information based on the correct history and diagnoses and pathology and doctors letters.”

Engagement in launch process

“I think timewise it’s good timing [launching at the end of the year] because it is getting closer to the slowdown period and maybe we’ll have a bit of more time to train ourselves and learn.”

“There have been a number of opportunities for us to go to [to training], but unfortunately most of the times that have been in ... Most of the nursing EMR training has been on those days, at very difficult times. It’s been a bit stressful trying to get to them.”

“there were a time everyone was involved [in EMR implementation] and everyone had the opportunity to look through the forms, because the forms were built on the basis of the [the existing platform]... Everyone had the chance to talk about it and discuss it.”

“I had a few opportunities to work with them [the implementation team]. When my manager was on holiday they actually called me to have some kind of meeting and some input on how the admin workflow goes in the clinic...I didn’t know the exact workflow in the EMR so I didn’t have any much concern but I gave some feedback, inputs, and all.”

“I had my training sessions this week with the EMR, and [the traininer] was saying to me that his impression, teaching people through this system has been generally very positive. So, people in general have a positive attitude towards it. At least at this point.”

“We’ve done lots of testing, but you never know until you implement it and you’re using it in the clinic, then only will you come up with what else is wrong with it.”

“To a degree, even today we’re in a training environment where some of the functions are not even enabled on the staff EMR. How can you go through and practice if you don’t even have it? I guess this was the period to find out that there were issues there, which is good before we go live. But again, until you real world, you can do a little mock whatever. It’s like getting married, you can go through all your practice routine, but on the day it’s a completely different story. I’m sitting back, I’ve reduced clinics, I’m anticipating the worst, hoping for the best.”

“it’s pretty good and mean we all just get one opportunity for training. It would have been nice to have a couple. Yeah, moderately satisfied. But I was involved in the design so for me it’s a bit more fluent.”

Standardisation and completeness of data

“the accuracy and quality of data will be greater as a result because it should hopefully there will be less transcription error... I think it’ll [the EMR], hopefully, it’ll increase integrity and the rigorousness of the data.”

“The only one of the big positives I mentioned before is obviously everything that’s contained in that one record, and we don’t have to search for a file.”

“I mean hopefully all the relevant information are scanned in on time so that you can actually just, it doesn’t matter where you are, you’d be able to access that, so that will be useful...You can access it wherever you are, I think that’s, rather than physically going find a file. I think that will be the biggest thing.”

“I think it’s going to improve a lot in terms of finding information easily, because there’s a lot of time spent, particularly, for the admin people. But also, if you ask for a file, somebody has to actually find the file, pull it out, then looking into it, and a lot of various ... When we have the new system up and running, we’ll be able to just log on and look up all the information electronically.”

“hopefully, we will find that the data that is collected is very accurate. I’m also hoping that it will be complete data. All of that, of course, depends on how much, how diligent people are in filling out the digital forms. But because they are also going to be used for clinical purposes and for correspondence with clinicians, so unless you actually enter information into the system, there won’t be anything coming out the other end. And I think that is going to be a safeguard for the data to be completely entered.”

“It will minimise the data entry errors ... also all the clinical data will be in there. A patient summary will be generated from the clinical data and that will be very useful for us to access for clinical purposes to get to know about the past history of the patient and also for research purposes it will make a huge difference that we’ll have access to all of this data.”

Effect on workload

“I think it’ll just be a bit slower initially, more than anything. But who knows, it might work really brilliantly, and save a bit of time in the end. I’m optimistic, put it that way.”

I’m pretty sure it will be a bit of a challenge but you can’t achieve any good things without a challenge. I think the first couple of weeks to start will be challenging, but after that you spend more time initially but save along the years.

“I’m really looking forward to doing EMR because I think positively, it may be a good change for us... our expectation is that maybe the workload will be little bit less. That stress will be less because now we are struggling with short staff and stuff like that. It’s hard to meet up with the deadlines and we push ourselves to complete that task, it’s sometimes really hard so we are hoping to get some relief off that.”