Errors and causes of communication failures from hospital information systems to electronic health record: A record-review study

Introduction: Failure in the communication of information and partial communication of information between hospital information systems (HIS) and the Iranian electronic health record (SEPAS) reduces the quality of information. The objective of this study was to identify the errors and causes of failure in the communication of patients' information from HISs to SEPAS. Methodology: This record-review study was conducted in the first quarter of 2016. In this study, 882 records which had failed to be sent from three hospital information systems to SEPAS were reviewed and data were collected using a data collection form. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics with SPSS.18. Results: The review of 882 hospital records resulted in the identification of 1256 errors of 41 different types. These errors were classified into 4 categories: administrative-financial errors (61%), errors related to national codes (23%), clinical errors (9%), and other errors (7%). In total, errors were categorized into two generic types: "system level errors (65%) and operator-dependent errors (35%)". The number of errors was a significant difference in the studied hospitals (p < 0.0001). Conclusions: This study identified a large number of system and operator-dependent errors hampering communication of information from HIS to SEPAS. Results revealed that the same hospital information systems used in different hospitals could face dissimilar types and levels of errors when communicating with other information systems. The results of this study can be used by system designers and health center policymakers to prevent the problems of information communication between health information systems.