Development and psychometric testing of the Readiness to Engage with Patient-Facing Health Information Technology Tools (RE-PHIT) scale.

Objective: With the proliferation of patient-facing health information technology (HIT) tools, nurses are in a position to support the technology needs of both patients and families. The purpose of this study was to develop and examine the psychometric properties of the Readiness to Engage with Patient-Facing Health Information Technology (RE-PHIT) instrument intended to measure nurse readiness to support patient and family use of HIT tools.

Materials And Methods: Content for the 10-item instrument was derived from the literature, notably from Hibbard's Patient Activation Measure and from expert nurse informaticists. Instrument validation was achieved through an expert panel approach for assessing content validity, exploratory factor analysis for assessing the construct validity and Cronbach's alpha were used to estimate the internal consistency reliability.

Results: Content validity produced indices ranging from 0.86 to 1.00 for all items. Exploratory factor analysis yielded a one-factor solution consisting of 10 items that explained 62.6% of the total variance and internal consistency reliability was high with a α = 0.93.

Discussion: Findings support the validity and reliability of a new instrument, RE-PHIT, which can be used to measure nurses' readiness to engage with patients and families with HIT tools. Future testing of this instrument should be conducted in additional care settings with different types of nursing clinical workflows and HIT tools.

Conclusion: A 10-item instrument, RE-PHIT, was developed to measure nurse readiness to support patient and family use of HIT tools. Results of the psychometric testing confirmed that the RE-PHIT scale is a valid and reliable tool.