Medical records have remained stubbornly resistant to digitisation agendas. For over two decades the UK government has focused government policy on the digitisation of medical records with the intention of improve its visibility to a range of actors involved in clinical care, and of ‘unlocking’ various efficiencies for the bureaucratic governance of healthcare. This thesis provides an ethnographic account of the medical record in order that we can understand digitisation in the contexts of the various actors’ desires for visibility and automation. The thesis argues that the medical record is a uniquely assembled technology that performs various functions that adjoin these desires in specific, negotiated ways. The transformation of these functions through digitisation constitutes a political realignment of the technology and of the settlement between actors regarding their role in a bureaucratic system of healing. This is a politics that runs deeper than the visibility of patient information, a politics that concerns wider questions of professional jurisdiction, knowledge production, and the determination of a/the central subject of clinical discourse.
A Sociology Of Medical Records: Digitising Clinical Knowledge
Perry, M. E. (Author). 1 Oct 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)