OBJECTIVE: The purposes of this study were to understand nurses' experience after the computerization of nursing care as a part of hospital information systems and to explore the change in nursing care time.

METHODS: This study used a qualitative approach. The subjects were ten nurses by purposeful snowball sampling. In-depth interview was performed. All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data were analyzed using qualitative theme analysis.

RESULTS: Nurses took into account the computerization as a 'benefit'. Their experiences after computerization were categorized into process and outcome impact. The emerged themes in nursing care process were 'accuracy', 'rapidness', and 'time saving in indirect nursing care'. Those in nursing care outcome included 'leisure', 'satisfaction', 'burden', and 'threatening privacy'. In addition, nurses' personal characteristics was the most important factor affecting the efficient use of saved time due to decrease of indirect nursing time to increase direct nursing care.

CONCLUSION: Maximizing the positive impact of computerization requires redesign of nursing job description and work pattern, and education of efficient time management for individual nurse.