Browsing by Subject "Medical secretaries"

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    Journal Article
    A Worker-Driven Common Information Space: Interventions into a Digital Future
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 29, No. 5, 2020) Møller, Naja Holten; Eriksen, Maren Gausdal; Bossen, Claus
    This paper empirically investigates a Common Information Space (CIS) established by medical secretaries so they could support each other during their workplace’s transition to a new comprehensive electronic health record, called the Healthcare Platform (HP). With the new system, the secretaries were expected to become partially obsolete, as doctors were to take on a significant load of the clerical work, such as documenting and coding. To handle their changing work situation, the medical secretaries set up an online support group in parallel to, but independent from, the official implementation support organization. The paper’s contribution is a characterization of the support group as a common information space (CIS), and analysis of the specific qualities of a worker-driven CIS as a forum for 1) articulation work required for re-grounding changing tasks and responsibilities, 2) archiving discussions (posts) and guidelines to further their collective interpretation, and 3) creating a space independent of management for employees to work out their new role in an organization in a situation of transition and change.
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    Journal Article
    Variations in Oncology Consultations: How Dictation Allows Variations to be Documented in Standardized Ways
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 27, No. 3-6, 2018) Mørck, Peter; Langhoff, Tue Odd; Christophersen, Mads; Møller, Anne Kirstine; Bjørn, Pernille
    In-between 2016 and 2017 a new hospital information system (HIS) was introduced at several hospitals in Denmark radically changing the core work practices for a majority of the healthcare professionals. Promptly, the new HIS began to receive criticism from healthcare professionals for failing to live up to proclaimed expectations. To fully understand the problems experienced by the healthcare professionals we need to understand the fundamental nature of the work prior to the implementation. In this paper, we investigate patient consultations as they were performed prior to the implementation of the HIS at an oncology department. Reporting from a 1.5 year-long study, we find patient consultations were organized in three sequential activities: review, interaction, and documentation. Further, we find that the dictaphone served as a key artifact allowing physicians to enact flexibility in documentation while simultaneously providing them with the capability to communicate and coordinate with the medical secretaries. Our empirical findings suggest that the medical secretaries are critical for structured documentation of variations in health data and are the cornerstones that allow physicians to enact sentimental efforts when interacting with patients. These insights prove important in understanding the criticism aimed at the new HIS implementation since the implementation removed the dictaphone as a key artifact and instead introduced a new organizational structure where documentation was assumed accomplished in parallel with patient interaction. The transformation consequently shifted work, previously performed by the medical secretaries, to the physicians.
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    Journal Article
    Variations in Oncology Consultations: How Dictation allows Variations to be Documented in Standardized Ways
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work 27(3-4)- ECSCW 2018: Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2018) Mørck, Peter; Langhoff, Tue Odd; Christophersen, Mads; Møller, Anne Kirstine; Bjørn, Pernille
    In-between 2016 and 2017 a new hospital information system (HIS) was introduced at several hospitals in Denmark radically changing the core work practices for a majority of the healthcare professionals. Promptly, the new HIS began to receive criticism from healthcare professionals for failing to live up to proclaimed expectations. To fully understand the problems experienced by the healthcare professionals we need to understand the fundamental nature of the work prior to the implementation. In this paper, we investigate patient consultations as they were performed prior to the implementation of the HIS at an oncology department. Reporting from a 1.5 year-long study, we find patient consultations were organized in three sequential activities: review, interaction, and documentation. Further, we find that the dictaphone served as a key artifact allowing physicians to enact flexibility in documentation while simultaneously providing them with the capability to communicate and coordinate with the medical secretaries. Our empirical findings suggest that the medical secretaries are critical for structured documentation of variations in health data and are the cornerstones that allow physicians to enact sentimental efforts when interacting with patients. These insights prove important in understanding the criticism aimed at the new HIS implementation since the implementation removed the dictaphone as a key artifact and instead introduced a new organizational structure where documentation was assumed accomplished in parallel with patient interaction. The transformation consequently shifted work, previously performed by the medical secretaries, to the physicians.