Data stakeholders interacting with patient data

Abstract

How data stakeholders interact with data is considered in this paper by incorporating a sociotechnical perspective. A data interaction enactment model is proposed to better understand how a logical structure is enacted when data stakeholders interact with data. The proposed model expands a technologies-in-practice view to also provide for the embodied structures of data objects. This extended technology-in-practice view provides designers with an approach that focuses on the interaction between data stakeholders and data objects. Although the proposed model is a generic model it is applied in the healthcare context for this study. An interpretive approach was used for a private healthcare centre as the case to investigate how healthcare professionals interact with patient records. The findings indicate the design of patient records based on the perceived anticipated use may not sufficiently provide for their actual use where different stakeholders need to interact with the patient records. An understanding of the relationships between designers, data stakeholders, the patient record structure enacted during interaction and its physical components is important. This may be one of the reasons why patient records are still mostly paper-based in spite of efforts to develop and adopt electronic patient record systems.