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How physicians 'achieve overview': a case-based study in a hospital ward

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Clinicians' work in hospitals is safety- and time-critical, and often stressful due to the number and complexity of patient cases they must attend to. Therefore, how clinicians gather information, identify problems and make decisions concerning patients is a crucial concern, a process that can be labelled 'achieving overview'. In the process, clinicians use various artefacts amongst which medical records are central. Decades of experience is embedded in the structure and use of paper-based records. However, the development of electronic patient records (EPR) will change both structure and use of medical records, including 'achieving overview'. We conducted an ethnographic study in a hospital ward using paper-based medical records in order to understand how clinicians achieve overview. Inspired by the approach of exnovation, we elicit the use of paper-based records in order to inform the design of EPRs. We propose five axes which span out the process of achieving overview and describe implications for design of EPRs.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
    February 2014
    1600 pages
    ISBN:9781450325400
    DOI:10.1145/2531602
    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: 15 February 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. distributed cognition
    2. electronic patient records
    3. ethnography
    4. healthcare
    5. narratives
    6. overview
    7. sensemaking

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    February 15 - 19, 2014
    Maryland, Baltimore, USA

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    CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)Charting the COVID Long Haul Experience - A Longitudinal Exploration of Symptoms, Activity, and Clinical AdherenceProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642827(1-21)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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