Person-centered hospital care in Indonesia: the role of digital health competency, user interface quality, and user experience in a multi-hospital study

Introduction Hospital digitalization is expected to strengthen person-centered care, yet the everyday experience of healthcare workers depends on both digital readiness and the usability of the systems they operate. This study examined how digital health competency and perceived user interface quality relate to user experience during routine hospital digital work in Indonesia. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted among healthcare workers from 20 hospitals in Semarang, Indonesia ( n = 704). Digital health competency was measured using a short public health informatics instrument. User interface quality was measured using a healthcare-oriented interface and usability questionnaire, and user experience was measured using a standardized user experience questionnaire. A prespecified mediation framework tested whether user interface quality mediated the association between digital health competency and user experience. Analyses were complemented with hospital random-intercept multilevel models to account for clustering, and heterogeneity was explored by professional group. Hospital characteristics (public vs. private ownership and related specifications) were examined as organizational factors in adjusted models and descriptive comparisons. Results Perceived user interface quality was the strongest and most proximal correlate of user experience. Digital health competency showed no detectable direct association with user experience and no indirect association through user interface quality. Hospital-level clustering explained only a small share of the variance in user experience, indicating that most variability occurred at the individual level. Item-level user interface quality responses highlighted actionable priorities—especially system stability (fewer errors), visibility of system status, and in-context help and error-recovery support. Conclusion Improving user interface quality appears to be a higher-leverage pathway for strengthening user experience and enabling person-centered workflows than generic digital upskilling alone. Digitalization strategies should treat usability as core infrastructure work by embedding human-centered requirements into procurement, acceptance testing, and continuous post-implementation improvement tailored to profession-specific workflows and organizational context.