Acceptability of Chinese Medicine Information Sharing in electronic Health Record Sharing System (eHRSS) in Chinese medicine practitioners: A mixed-method study

Background and objectives The Stage Two Development of eHRSS aimed to broaden the scope of sharable data and advance technical capability for sharing of Chinese Medicine (CM) information. This study aims to evaluate the adoption level and perceived difficulties of Chinese medicine practitioners (CMPs) towards EC Connect, and its impact on CM services.

Methods All registered or listed CMPs were recruited in study 1. Descriptive analysis included age, gender, socioeconomic status, and past medical history was performed with multiple logistic regression models. In-depth interviews were conducted among EC Connect Users and Healthcare Providers (HCP) who upload information of Chinese Medicine to eHRSS.

Results A total of 420 participants were included in this study. The majority of the respondents were in the 31–40 years age group (N = 133, 31.7 %) and practicing in private clinic (N = 311, 74.0 %). Respondents whom agreed that the expansion of sharing scope would be helpful to various stakeholders were 5 times more likely to be interested in joining eHRSS (aOR = 5.01, 95 % CI = 2.73–9.20, p < 0.001). Study 2 found that eHRSS allowed CMPs to share and record medical data, and to access patients’ western medical records while inconsistency of medical systems between Western and Chinese medicine should be considered.

Conclusions We found that accessing and sharing medical records was important to CMPs. eHRSS helped to facilitate more accurate association between Western and Chinese medical doctors, while more efforts were needed to increase the acknowledgement among the general public.