Background: In Sweden, eHealth services have continuously been implemented in healthcare. However, despite the frequent report of incident interruptions involving eHealth in Swedish healthcare, research seldom investigates eHealth-related incidents that could potentially deteriorate healthcare quality and safety. Therefore, this study aims to identify and characterize eHealth-related incidents that occurred in routine clinical practice in Swedish healthcare.

Methods: The study employed a qualitative design, and the data were collected through semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions. Seven interviews were conducted through emails while one through telephone with medical engineers, healthcare quality managers, and healthcare professionals. In total, 30 incidents were identified from the transcribed text and analyzed iteratively in two distinct phases. Deductive analysis using Magrabi’s HIT-CS was conducted firstly, followed by qualitative thematic analysis.

Results: Within 30 incidents, 51 eHealth-related issues were found using deductive analysis. These included technical issues (51%) and human (use) factor related issues (39%). Inductive analysis highlighted the issues involving patient details in electronic medical record systems and DICOM resulting in decreased efficiency of healthcare. Besides, of three instances of patient harm, two were triggered by poor integration of electronic medical record systems and pharmaceutical systems.

Conclusion: The finding highlighted that eHealth-related incidents arose with the system issues and the user-related issues and further led to the negative impacts on healthcare quality. It was also emphasized that the poor integration among systems posed risks to patient safety, and special attention should be paid to the pharmaceutical systems and electronic medical record systems.