Exploring the technology readiness of nursing and medical students at a Canadian University

Abstract

Technology readiness is a well-established construct that refers to individuals' ability to embrace and adopt new technology. Given the increasing use of advanced technologies in the delivery of health care, this study uses the Technology Readiness Index (Parasuraman, 2000) to explore the technology readiness of nursing and medical students from the fall 2006 cohort at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The three major findings from this study are that (i) rural nursing students are more insecure with technology than their urban counterparts, (ii) male medical students score higher on innovation than their female counterparts and have a higher overall technology readiness attitude than female medical students, and (iii) medical students who are older than 25 have a negative technology readiness score whereas those under 25 had a positive score. These findings suggest health care professional schools would be well served to implement curricular changes designed to support the needs of rural students, women, and those entering school at a non-traditional age. In addition, patterns such as those observed in this study highlight areas of emphasis for current practitioners as health care organizations develop continuing education offerings for staff.

The moderating role of technology readiness, gender, and sex in consumer acceptance and actual use of Technology-based services

“…Thus, it shows the level of consumers' readiness to embrace a new technology and their technical and personal abilities to actually use it (Caison et al, 2008). Cunningham et al (2002) state that an individual's perception of the benefits of change is an initiator of readiness for change.…”

Assessing the Relationship between Technology Readiness and Continuance Intention in an E-Appointment System: Relationship Quality as a Mediator

“…Numerous studies have observed that satisfaction can enhance long term user intention to use a system. Customer continuance intention or loyalty could be established given satisfactory experience [7,22,24,25,36,55]. Additionally, trust was the key element that customers or system users were willing to provide their personal information to system service providers over the Internet [14,15,56,57].…”

Online interprofessional health sciences education: From theory to practice

“…will more readily use technology. 21 E-learning should thus be a staple of prelicensure education. Care should be taken, however, to ensure that those professionals already in the workplace have access to adequate support in learning to learn-about interprofessional practice at the practice site, but also through the Internet.…”