Abstract
Continuity of care is a central topic for healthcare practice and is closely related to issues of collaboration. Thus, studying continuity of care from a CSCW perspective can help us understand what makes continuity of care in practice. In this paper, we show how collaborative technologies are appropriated differently in two cases, one in Denmark and the other in the US. We illustrate how this appropriation is dependent on challenges particular to the organizational context of work. Studying the practices in two different hospital departments we found that in practice achieving continuity of care depends on two main characteristics in the organization of work, namely (1) the constitution of roles and (2) the responsibility for care linked to the appropriation of collaborative technologies. These characteristics of the organization of work create different solutions to the challenges of discontinuity when physicians appropriate mundane collaborative technologies: patient records and pagers. To understand how continuity of care is achieved in practice we have to study the appropriation of technologies, the paper argues, and by comparing across cases we may begin to discern challenges that cut across context—and their different origins.
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Acknowledgments
A great thank you to all of the medical department staff at the US hospital and the Danish hospital for always being open and welcoming. Also, a special thank you to Yunan Chen for arranging for me to conduct the US case study. The US study was carried out under the IRB number UCI HS# 2009-6754. I am grateful to Pernille Bjørn, Nina Boulus-Rødje, Yunan Chen, Christopher Gad, Gunnar Ellingsen and Irina Shklovski for their constructive discussion and comments in the process of writing this paper.
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Holten Møller, N.L. (2013). Achieving Continuity of Care: A Study of the Challenges in a Danish and a US Hospital Department. In: Bertelsen, O., Ciolfi, L., Grasso, M., Papadopoulos, G. (eds) ECSCW 2013: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 21-25 September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5346-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5346-7_12
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