Maintaining redundancy in the coordination of medical emergencies

• Authors: Aksel Tjora
• Venue: CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
• Year: 2004

This paper reports from a study of Norwegian medical emergency call (AMK) centres, in which advanced radio and telephone communication technologies are handled by a team of nurses and ambulance personnel to coordinate medical emergency resources (ambulances, doctors, helicopters, and so on). The AMK centres have made use of a range of technologies since they were established 15-20 years ago. During the last 5 years, several of the centres have implemented an information system, AMIS to integrate several functions that before were handled by using separate specialised systems. By observation in seven medical emergency call centres and a survey covering 38 of 43 such centres in Norway in the period 1996-2002, this study focuses on collaboration and use of communication technologies in a teamwork setting. It is found that important aspects of the AMK centre teamwork include redundancy of communication, competence and technologies, as well as a well-developed overall attention from the operators. These aspects support a transparent social integration of technologies in use. The use of integrated systems, such as the AMIS, may challenge this transparency, by which one operator may follow the other operator's actions. It is concluded that serious care must be taken to introduce larger information systems, so that basic principles, which have emerged during the teamwork practice to secure high service reliability, are maintained.