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.