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Formalizing work: reallocating redundancy

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports from an introduction of the electronic patient record for nurses in a Norwegian hospital. In addition to establish electronic written accounts of nurses' reports, a major aim was to formalize nurses' work, related to handover conferences. Despite the projects proclaimed success, like reduced overtime, improved quality of the written documentation and eliminated redundancy, our analysis demonstrates an opposite effect. Formalizing the nursing handover and thus reduce redundancy, in fact resulted in a reintroduction of redundancy, although at another time and place. We found that work (and redundancy) in fact had moved, to another time (i), into different artifacts (ii), or old artifacts that now were used/annotated differently (iii).

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2006
548 pages
ISBN:1595932496
DOI:10.1145/1180875
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: 04 November 2006

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration
  2. coordination
  3. formal
  4. health care work
  5. informal
  6. nursing
  7. redundancy
  8. transformation

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CSCW06
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CSCW06: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 4 - 8, 2006
Alberta, Banff, Canada

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  • (2018)Repetita IuvantComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-017-9303-z27:3-6(1051-1084)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
  • (2017)Technology meets tradition: The perceived impact of the introduction of information and communication technology on ward rounds in the intensive care unitInternational Journal of Medical Informatics10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2017.04.004105(49-58)Online publication date: Sep-2017
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