A multi-country examination of approaches for investigating the attitudes of health care professionals towards the development and use of information systems

This paper discusses the development of approaches that facilitate the investigation of differences between countries in the attitudes of health care professionals towards information systems. Ensuring the availability of suitable tools to investigate attitudes is important because of the perceived failure of many health information systems to deliver expected benefits, in particular in international developments, and the perception that attitudes of users are one factor that can have an impact on the success or failure of these systems. A participative approach was taken to the development of the tools, to reduce ethnocentricity in their design, and their suitability was tested by their use, in practice, in a study on attitudes towards information systems, involving professionals working in the health sector in Georgia, Tajikistan, Uganda and UK. The approaches include tools to facilitate structured group discussions and stakeholder engagement, as well as tools to assist in the development of self completion questionnaires.