Electronic medical records (EMR) are currently being implemented in psychiatric hospitals throughout Europe. The perceptions of health care professionals can contribute important information that may predict their acceptance of and desired mode of use for EMR, thus guiding EMR implementation.

To develop a self-administered instrument designed to assess health care professionals’ satisfaction regarding EMR in a psychiatric hospital, based only on the professional point of view, according to the psychometric standards.

The development was supervised by a steering committee and undertaken by three standard steps. Item generation was derived from 115 face-to-face interviews with health care professionals in a French, public, psychiatric hospital. The item-reduction process resulted in a 25-item questionnaire. The validation process was based on construct validity, reliability and some aspects of external validity.

The final version of the questionnaire contained 25 items that described five dimensions, leading to a global score. The factor structure accounted for 72% of the total variance. Internal consistency was satisfactory (item-internal consistency over 0.40 and Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from 0.86 to 0.95). The scalability was satisfactory with INFIT statistics inside an acceptable range. Scores of dimensions were strongly positively correlated with visual analogue scale scores (all p < 0.001). External validity showed statistical associations between scores and age, gender, seniority in psychiatry and ward type. Participation rate was 66%.

The availability of a reliable and valid questionnaire (professionals’ satisfaction questionnaire with electronic medical records [PSQ-EMR]) concerning health care professionals’ satisfaction regarding EMR in psychiatry, exclusively generated from interviews with health care professionals, enables legitimate feedback to be incorporated into EMR implementation in order to formulate a high-quality health care.