Information Technology Adoption and Literacy in Health Care Practice: A Case Study

The purpose of this study at King Saud Medical City (KSMC) was to evaluate the IT literacy level in using modern new Information technology (IT) applications among health Practitioners at King Saud Medical City, a group of tertiary-care hospitals for medicine and surgery in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A cross-sectional study was developed and a survey questionnaire was distributed to a sample of health care practitioners of KSMC. Main results from the research showed that a very high percentage of participants considered themselves as semi-full or fully skilled in using Internet and IT office applications. The percent rate of all participants who have access to the Internet and use computer workstations regularly in their daily practice are 66.0% and 87.2% respectively, with no major difference is noticed with respect to participant gender. The study statistics showed also that the most common daily application used were: browsing through Internet Search Engines & Web sites, using PDA for medical research followed by using electronic mail packages eg MS Mail, Outlook.