TY - JOUR
T1 - Professionals as Change Agents or Instruments of Reproduction? Medical Residents’ Reasoning for Not Sharing the Electronic Health Record Screen with Patients
AU - Campos-Castillo, Celeste
AU - Chesley, Noelle
AU - Asan, Onur
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors.
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - The stability of physicians’ authority over patients despite decades of changes in medicine conflicts with newer institutionalist accounts of professionals as change agents rather than instruments of reproduction. We analyzed whether the cultural scripts that twenty-one residents used to justify their approach to a new change, the electronic health record (EHR), signaled a leveling of the patient-physician hierarchy. Residents are intriguing because their position makes them open to change. Indeed, residents justified using the EHR in ways that level the patient-physician hierarchy, but also offered rationales that sustain it. For the latter, residents described using the EHR to substantiate their expertise, situate themselves as brokers between patients and the technology, and preserve the autonomy of clinicians. Our findings highlight how professionals with little direct experience before a change can selectively apply incumbent scripts to sustain extant structures, while informing newer institutionalist accounts of professionals and the design of EHR systems.
AB - The stability of physicians’ authority over patients despite decades of changes in medicine conflicts with newer institutionalist accounts of professionals as change agents rather than instruments of reproduction. We analyzed whether the cultural scripts that twenty-one residents used to justify their approach to a new change, the electronic health record (EHR), signaled a leveling of the patient-physician hierarchy. Residents are intriguing because their position makes them open to change. Indeed, residents justified using the EHR in ways that level the patient-physician hierarchy, but also offered rationales that sustain it. For the latter, residents described using the EHR to substantiate their expertise, situate themselves as brokers between patients and the technology, and preserve the autonomy of clinicians. Our findings highlight how professionals with little direct experience before a change can selectively apply incumbent scripts to sustain extant structures, while informing newer institutionalist accounts of professionals and the design of EHR systems.
KW - agency
KW - neo-institutionalism
KW - professional autonomy
KW - screen sharing
KW - sociotechnical systems
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85144597339&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85144597339&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/fi14120367
DO - 10.3390/fi14120367
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85144597339
VL - 14
JO - Future Internet
JF - Future Internet
IS - 12
M1 - 367
ER -