TY - JOUR
T1 - Conceptualizing the digitalization of healthcare work
T2 - A metaphor-based critical interpretive synthesis
AU - Carboni, Chiara
AU - Wehrens, Rik
AU - van derVeen, Romke
AU - de Bont, Antoinette
N1 - Funding Information:
We also want to acknowledge the program Medical Delta's Journey from Prototype to Payment for funding the PhD trajectory (project number 22070000.051.002) as part of which this article was written.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The digitalization of healthcare work has gained center stage in academic debates spanning disciplines as diverse as medicine, sociology and STS. The different analytical interests and methodological traditions of these three strains of scholarship have, however, resulted in quite diverging approaches to this issue. Points of interest have ranged from the (disattended) promise of increased efficiency of healthcare work, to dynamics of task delegation, (re-)professionalization and (re-)distribution of invisible work, to the disruption of informal organization. Instead of studying these dynamics in practice, in this paper we foreground the potentiality for theory-making inherent in the systematic cross-contamination of different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. We perform a Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) centering the ways the digitalization of healthcare work has been investigated in recent STS, sociological and medical literature. To open up assumptions and insights intrinsic to each body of literature for scholars and practitioners in other fields, we propose here a metaphor-based variation on CIS approaches. We probe, in turn, what slime molds can teach us about STS's focus on interconnections and materiality, how we can better understand sociological analyses of invisible work exploring them through theatrical performances, and which lessons river engineering offers concerning medical scholarship's discussion of efficiency and proper healthcare work. Thinking through these metaphors, we conceptualize the digitalization of healthcare work as a phenomenon spanning, at once, the directionality of technological innovation trajectories and the open-endedness of situated changes in work practices. Based on our analysis, we propose focusing on technological scripts, and various forms of invisible work and informal organization as entry points into the study of the tension between directionality and open-endedness in the context of the digitalization of healthcare work.
AB - The digitalization of healthcare work has gained center stage in academic debates spanning disciplines as diverse as medicine, sociology and STS. The different analytical interests and methodological traditions of these three strains of scholarship have, however, resulted in quite diverging approaches to this issue. Points of interest have ranged from the (disattended) promise of increased efficiency of healthcare work, to dynamics of task delegation, (re-)professionalization and (re-)distribution of invisible work, to the disruption of informal organization. Instead of studying these dynamics in practice, in this paper we foreground the potentiality for theory-making inherent in the systematic cross-contamination of different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. We perform a Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) centering the ways the digitalization of healthcare work has been investigated in recent STS, sociological and medical literature. To open up assumptions and insights intrinsic to each body of literature for scholars and practitioners in other fields, we propose here a metaphor-based variation on CIS approaches. We probe, in turn, what slime molds can teach us about STS's focus on interconnections and materiality, how we can better understand sociological analyses of invisible work exploring them through theatrical performances, and which lessons river engineering offers concerning medical scholarship's discussion of efficiency and proper healthcare work. Thinking through these metaphors, we conceptualize the digitalization of healthcare work as a phenomenon spanning, at once, the directionality of technological innovation trajectories and the open-endedness of situated changes in work practices. Based on our analysis, we propose focusing on technological scripts, and various forms of invisible work and informal organization as entry points into the study of the tension between directionality and open-endedness in the context of the digitalization of healthcare work.
KW - BOUNDARY WORK
KW - DOCTORS
KW - Digital health
KW - ELECTRONIC PATIENT RECORD
KW - IMAGINARIES
KW - Informal organization
KW - Literature review
KW - MEDICAL-RECORD
KW - Medical technology
KW - NURSES
KW - PROFESSIONALS
KW - Professions
KW - QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
KW - TECHNOLOGY
KW - TELEMEDICINE
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119919638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114572
DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114572
M3 - Review article
VL - 292
JO - Social Science & Medicine
JF - Social Science & Medicine
SN - 0277-9536
M1 - 114572
ER -