The survey data of patients, prescribers, and pharmacists' feedback on ePrescription systems security and privacy

Objective: To evaluate the attitudes of the parties (i.e. patients, prescribers, and pharmacists) involved in the ePrescription systems toward the new features and measure the potential benefits of introducing the use of blockchain and machine learning (ML) to strengthen the in-place methods for safely prescribing and dispensing medication.

Methods: The survey contains questions about the features introduced in the proposed approach of using blockcahin and ML in the ePrescription system to evaluate the security, privacy, reliability, and availability of the ePrescription information in the system.

The study population is comprised of 284 respondents in the patient group, 39 respondents in the pharmacist group, and 27 respondents in the prescriber group, all of whom met the inclusion criteria. The response rate was 80% (226/284) in the patient group, 87% (34/39) in the pharmacist group, and 96% (26/27) in the prescriber group. We removed the responses of participants who did not complete the surevy questions.

Conclusion: Our survey showed that a vast majority of respondents in all groups had positive attitudes towards using blockchain and ML algorithms to safely prescribe medications. However, a need for minor improvements regarding the proposed features was identified, and a post-implementation user study is needed to evaluate the proposed ePrescription system in depth.

Methods
The survey was a web-based questionnaire composed using the Dalhousie University's Opinio survey system in January 2021. The system enables the users to compose a survey question and collect the data in CSV files, and it provides a link to be distributed for participation.

The patients' group questionnaire link was distributed using the university emailing list and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

For the prescribers and pharmacists groups, we disturbed their questionnaire links using emailing the prescribers' offices and pharmacies, the physicians and pharmacists associations, posting in the prescribers' and pharmacists' LinkedIn groups in Canada, the US, and the UK.