Information Technology As A Communcator In Community Health Services

Dr.polit project in short terms:



Electronic Patient Record Stimulates The Communication Factors Among The Public Health Care Workers In The Community.



Summery
The study of technology has recently become more focused in various schools of sociology. However, Marxixt, functionalist, social constructivist, and ethnographic research, have tended to explain technology development either from macro or micro perspectives. Further research is needed to increase our understanding of technology as situated in its social and institutional contexts, where individual and professional relations are considered. In this thesis, elements of several approaches are applied to the study of communication in community health care.



About ten years ago, EPR (electronic patient record), where introduced in the home nursery and health institutions in Trondheim. The documentary system where used only by the first hand helpers in the health system. They have now started a new EPR-system to integrate all health service workers to document electronic. This means that doctors, nurses, assistants and so on have to registrate their observations and documentation by a computer. As a matter of fact, this EPR will probably affect the communication, documentation and organisation structure between the health care workers. The thesis will see how this aspects will change by the professions when new EPR is intervened.



Using a comparative case approach, the use of technology will be studied through interviews with nurses, doctors and administrative personnel and by observation of the work in the health care centres in Trondheim.

Veileder: professor Eli Haugen Bunch, UIO, institutt for sykepleievitenskap

Biveileder: forsker Anne Moen, UIO, InterMedia.