# Bicentric evaluation of employee satisfaction, patient safety and treatment quality: comparing different Health Information System (HIS) solutions

## TL;DR

This study compares two types of health information systems and finds that a customized, uniform system improves user satisfaction, patient safety, and treatment quality.

## Contribution

The study provides a bicentric evaluation of HIS solutions from healthcare workers' perspectives, highlighting usability and satisfaction differences.

## Key findings

- Healthcare professionals using a customized HIS reported higher satisfaction and perceived better patient safety and treatment quality.
- The customized system was rated more positively for usability and workflow support compared to a multimodal HIS.
- The findings suggest that uniform, customized HIS solutions may enhance staff satisfaction and care quality in healthcare settings.

## Abstract

Transforming healthcare related work processes through digitization may help to address the growing demands placed on employees by enhancing user satisfaction and may have an impact on patient safety and treatment quality. Hereby, different approaches reaching from multimodal, workflow-specific systems to more uniform and comprehensive formats have been introduced.

To date, few comparative studies have examined different Health Information System (HIS) approaches from the perspective of healthcare workers. This study aims to evaluate perceived usability, quality, and compliance of two distinct clinical HIS types.

In this cross-sectional, bicentric study, we compared a multimodal HIS platform with a variation of different digital systems to a uniform, customized HIS solution that was specifically programmed for Otorhinolaryngology, across two university hospital departments in Germany. A total of n = 57 participants (physicians and nurses) completed a 61-item standardized questionnaire. Group differences were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U test.

Healthcare professionals using the multimodal HIS reported significantly lower overall satisfaction, perceived patient safety and treatment quality compared to those using the customized HIS. The latter system was also rated more positively regarding usability and workflow support. Currently, particularly in Germany, significant efforts are needed across all hierarchical levels to establish a cohesive and clear digital HIS with inter-professional, -institutional, -sectional abilities.

Our study highlights the perceived advantages of a more uniform and customized HIS from the user’s perspective in healthcare, suggesting that these systems could enhance both staff satisfaction and the quality of care.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-025-13559-y.