Electronic Health Records and User Participation: Digital Natives versus Digital Immigrants

The need for clarity in the healthcare management is a matter of frequent discussion and concern among healthcare professionals, practitioners, patients and academicians. Electronic Health Records would provide clarity, transparency, interoperability and transferability in the health care information and data of the patients. It will also reduce the human mistakes and will reduce the likelihood of wrongly reading or interpreting the information. This paper introduces this useful concept and links it to the two classes of health care practitioners- ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’. The paper further identifies and discusses the relationship between user participation and system success and analyses the impact of moderation by digital natives and digital immigrants. The paper draws evidences from the existing state of literature to propose the relationships. Implications of the research to the practitioners and researchers are discussed.