Electronic Health Records: Applying Diffusion of Innovation Theory to the relationship between multifactor authentication and EHR adoption

Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are increasingly becoming accepted as future direction of medical record management systems. Programs such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have provided incentives to hospitals that adopt EHR systems. In spite of these incentives, the perception of EHR adoption is that is has not achieved the desired growth rates. Many studies have failed to find what factors compels hospitals to adopt EHR systems. This study takes a precursory look at the role of Information Security by examining the relationship between the presence of multifactor authentication capability at hospitals and EHR adoption. It also uses Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOIT) for the theoretical framework of adoption. The study found no correlation between multifactor authentication and EHR adoption. It also found that the DOIT Category of Innovativeness is the same for hospitals with and without multifactor authentication. The study found that hospitals with multifactor authentication capability adopt more EHR functional areas than those without.