Health Professionals’ Use of Online Information Retrieval Systems and Online Evidence Paschalina LIALIOU a,1 , Ioanna PAVLOPOULOU b and John MANTAS a a Health Informatics Laboratory, Department of Nursing, School of Health Sciences, b Pediatric Research Laboratory, Department of Nursing, School of Health Sciences, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Abstract. Across-sectional survey was designed to determine health professionals’ awareness and usage of online evidence retrieval systems in clinical practice. A questionnaire was used to measure professionals’ behavior and utilization of online evidences, as well as, reasons and barriers on information retrieval. 439 nurses and physicians from public and private hospitals in Greece formulate the study’s sample. The two most common reasons that individuals are using online information systems were for writing scientific manuscripts or filling a knowledge gap. A positive correlation was found between participants with postgraduate studies and information system usage. The majority of them (90,6%) believe that online information systems improves patient care and 67,6% of them had their own experiences on this. More support is needed to nurses and physicians in order to use the online evidence and as a result to improve the provided care and practices. Keywords. Online evidence, Information retrieval, Use of evidence 1. Introduction Health professionals have many information needs at the point of care for a variety of issues. The right choice of an appropriate information source is another critical subject on this domain. Six types of information needs has identified: refreshing, confirming, logistics, teaching, idea generating, and personal learning[1]. These information needs seem to be related to the usage of online information sources (MEDLINE, UpToDate) and reveal the necessity of evidence-based practice training. On the other hand, nurses show a preference on human and printed information resources over electronic resources, due to convenience, reliability, and ease of use of the provided information. Findings suggest that insufficient skills, training, and time were some of the top factor- barriers for using electronic resources. Also, work-related factors have a higher impact on the relation between credibility and trust of the information sources, than the personal motivation factors in dissemination of knowledge from the information sources[2,3].Online information retrieval sustain the utilization of research and provide 1 Corresponding Author: Paschalina Lialiou. 123, Papadiamantopoulou Str. Athens, Greece, email: plialiou@nurs.uoa.gr. Exploring Complexity in Health: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach A. Hoerbst et al. (Eds.) © 2016 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-678-1-801 801