| Research objective. While the adoption of e-prescribing is growing, the Institute of Medicine's recommendations that all prescriptions be routed electronically by 2010 certainly has not been met. Therefore, the objective of this study is to compare the factors that physicians find encouraging and discouraging about e-prescribing based on their e-prescribing adoption status.;Study design. Cross-sectional, descriptive design. An Internet-based survey was sent to national convenience sample of physicians. Using e-prescribing literature, 44 items were developed concerning various factors related to the adoption of e-prescribing. Physicians rated how much the factors encouraged them or discouraged them about e-prescribing. Analysis procedures included descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, and MANOVA.;Results. The national convenience sample of physicians was obtained from a physician panel. The sample consisted of 443 complete responses of primary care physicians (PCPs) in the areas of family and general medicine (53.5%), internal medicine (39.5%) and others (7%) currently practicing in the United States. Physicians were 51 years old on average. 77.4% of respondents were male, 70.2% owned a private practice, and 83.7% practiced in rural areas. Exploratory factor analysis procedures resulted in seven components: Pre-implementation factors, technology factors, features, external influences, patient factors, post-implementation factors, and cost factors. Cronbach's alpha of the scales ranged from .84 to .95. Overall, respondents reported pre-implementation factors and cost factors to be slightly discouraging. Respondents reported technology factors, software features, and patient factors to be encouraging, with software features being the most encouraging. External influences and post-implementation factors were slightly encouraging or discouraging, depending on the group of respondents.;Conclusions. Results of this analysis suggest that those respondents who have considered e-prescribing but have no intention to adopt it and those respondents who are in the process of adopting e-prescribing in the next six months are significantly more discouraged about e-prescribing factors than those who have adopted e-prescribing greater than six months ago. Interestingly, all respondents found electronic prescribing features to be encouraging, and, in fact, the most encouraging of all the factors. This may suggest that electronic prescribing vendors are meeting the needs of prescribers when it comes to software features. |
