Measuring and describing perceived quality on physiotherapy practice management software.

INTRODUCTION: Despite the growing trend in the use of digital technologies in physiotherapy, the overall adoption and satisfaction of both, practice management software (PMS) and electronic health records in physiotherapy clinics has been low and slow over time. Satisfaction of expectations or perceived quality (PQ) is an abstract construct based on the discrepancy between expectations and perceptions, to measure the satisfaction of physiotherapists on PMS. This study aims to develop and validate an instrument to measure PQ on PMS, and to describe the PQ of the currently available physiotherapy PMS. METHODS: Instrument development study with validity and reliability testing. The development of this questionnaire was conducted in 3 phases: identification of attributes to be explored; development of the item pairs and pretesting; pilot study for item reduction, and psychometric testing. The questionnaire was distributed to chartered physiotherapists. A total of 144 participants completed the questionnaire. RESULTS: A series of analyses were conducted to assess item reduction, factor structure of the questionnaire and metric properties of multi-item scales. From the initial 43 attributes, the final version of the Quality Questionnaire on Physiotherapy Practice Management Software consisted of 24 items of PQ on PMS, structured in 3 areas (clinical care, administrative activities, and accounting), which included 11, 9, and 4 items grouped into 4, 3, and 2 scales respectively. The questionnaire proved to be reliable and valid. In multitrait scaling analysis, all scores had strong item-scale correlations, excellent item scaling success, and good internal consistency (Cronbach alpha coefficients of >0.7). CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides a valuable PQ questionnaire on PMS attributes for clinical care, administrative activities, and accounting. The attributes related to clinical care and control stock supplies showed a worse PQ. This suggests that those functions related to clinical care should be improved to facilitate greater satisfaction with physiotherapy PMS.

Development and validity of the expectations of physiotherapists questionnaire on practice management software.

Background: Despite the growing trend in the use of digital technologies in physiotherapy, the overall adoption of both, practice management software (PMS) and electronic health records in physiotherapy clinics has been low and slow over time. In order to learn what factors determine the adoption of these technologies by physiotherapists, there is a need to examine the expectations of physiotherapists (EPs) on specific software attributes. The main aims of this study were to develop a questionnaire to measure and describe the EPs towards PMS. The knowledge of these EPs will be useful to guide PMS design in order to improve physiotherapists' satisfaction. Methods: Instrument development study with validity and reliability testing. The development of this questionnaire was conducted in three phases: identification of attributes to be explored, development of the items, pilot study, and psychometric testing. The questionnaire was distributed to chartered physiotherapists. A total of 272 participants completed the questionnaire. Results: A series of analysis were conducted to assess item reduction, factor structure of the questionnaire and metric properties of multi-item scales. From the initial 43 attributes, the final version of the questionnaire consisted of 26 items on EPs, grouped in nine scales and two areas (clinical care and administrative activities). As a result, all scores had strong item-scale correlations, excellent item scaling success, and good internal consistency (Cronbach alpha coefficients of >.7). Our study also showed that current EPs were high towards most of the items, only two scales concentrated most of the attributes with the least expectations (monitoring quality of care and digital health interventions). Our study included physiotherapists with and without experience with PMS, and it showed that both groups had a similar pattern of expectations. Our study provides a valuable questionnaire of EP on PMS attributes for clinical care and administrative activities and shows a detailed development process.