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Participatory health information systems development in Cuba: the challenge of addressing multiple levels in a centralized setting

Published: 27 July 2004 Publication History

Abstract

This paper will address issues of user participation in a large centralistic organization. It is based on one year experience of developing a computerized health information system within the Cuban health services. Relevant literature suggests that participative methods may be less feasible in centralistic environments. This paper confirms this by describing how participation in Cuba is restricted by political and organizational constraints. There is however documented that participatory approaches may be very rewording where such constraints are overcome. Experiences from a broad range of health units and organizational levels in the Cuban project show a trend of weakening centralistic control with regard to hierarchical level and geographic distance, and thus more autonomous organizational units and participating individuals at lower level farther from Havana. The research reported is carried out within a framework of a larger network of similar health information projects being carried out in Africa and Asia, and the case of Cuba is being compared with experience from these countries.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PDC 04: Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - Volume 1
July 2004
245 pages
ISBN:1581138512
DOI:10.1145/1011870
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: 27 July 2004

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