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Medical Secretaries’ Care of Records: The Cooperative Work of a Non-clinical Group

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

We describe the cooperative work of medical secretaries at two hospital departments, during the implementation of an electronic health record system. Medical secretaries' core task is to take care of patient records by ensuring that also do information gatekeeping and articulation work. The EHR implementation stressed their importance to the departments' work arrangements, coupled their work more tightly to that of other staff, and led to task drift among professions. information is complete, up to date, and correctly coded. Medical secretaries While medical secretaries have been relatively invisible to health informatics and CSCW, this case study identifies their importance, and suggests that they and other non-clinical groups should be considered, when developing health care IT. We propose the term 'boundary-object trimming', to conceptualize their contributions to hospitals' cooperative work arrangements.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Number of pages10
Volume2012
Place of publicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication year2012
Pages821-830
ISBN (print)978-1-4503-1086-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
EventThe 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - Hyatt Regency Bellevue, Seattle, United States
Duration: 11 Feb 201215 Feb 2012

Conference

ConferenceThe 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
LocationHyatt Regency Bellevue
LandUnited States
BySeattle
Periode11/02/201215/02/2012
SeriesConference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Proceedings

    Research areas

  • computer supported cooperative work, Hospitals, medical secretaries, Ethnography

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