Identifying the User in Healthcare Information Systems Resear

Applying IS research to the healthcare context is an important endeavor. However, IS researchers must be cautious about identifying individual roles, the context of the setting, and postulating generalizability [1-4]. Much of IS theory is rooted within the organization, its business processes, and stakeholders. IS researchers need to understand the healthcare setting before they can appropriately apply IS theory. Hospitals, emergency rooms, and laboratories are very different from the normal "business" environment, and "healthcare users" vary considerably in the role they play. Obviously, if we are studying the wrong person, or group of people, we cannot expect to get relevant results. In order to alleviate confusion regarding who is the user in healthcare IS research, we provide examples of several healthcare scenarios, perform a simplified stakeholder analysis in each scenario, and identify the stakeholder and/or user in each scenario.