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Medical secretaries' care of records: the cooperative work of a non-clinical group

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

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 information is complete, up to date, and correctly coded. Medical secretaries 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. 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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 2012
1460 pages
ISBN:9781450310864
DOI:10.1145/2145204
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. electronic health records
  2. health care
  3. invisible work
  4. medical secretaries
  5. non-clinical groups

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CSCW '12
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CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 11 - 15, 2012
Washington, Seattle, USA

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CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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