Formalizing work: reallocating redundancy

  • Authors:
  • Glenn Munkvold;Gunnar Ellingsen;Hege Koksvik

  • Affiliations:
  • Nord-Trøndelag University College, Steinkjer, Norway;University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway;Trondheim University Hospital, Trondheim, Norway

  • Venue:
  • CSCW '06 Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2006

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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).