Data-Driven Decision Making: A Critical View on the Role of Quantified Self in Healthcare

New self-care practices, such as self-management of chronic diseases, have emerged through mobile applications and devices, often designed, developed, and used outside the healthcare context. The development may lead to increased patient empowerment, shared decision-making and better communication, which is expected to benefit the care process. However, there are also potentially harmful effects related to safety, reliability, and security, with a corresponding need for understanding underlying algorithms and biases that may affect users. This calls for socio-technical perspectives, which take into consideration both the technological aspects of developing the app, as well as the social aspects of stakeholder involvement and collaborative design. In this article, we describe the design and development of a mobile app for food nutrition information as part of diabetes self-management and critically discuss its implications for patients and designers. Our findings show that important learning aspects are connected to self-management, but there are also risks involved if too much or too little reliance is placed on the mobile app in the decision-making process

Shared Workspaces of the Digital Workplace: From Design for Coordination to Coordination for Flexible Design

The emergence of new digital platforms and social software at work changes workplaces and how people coordinate their work. To date, coordination has only been minimally studied in the context of the social software enabled digital workplace. Through a qualitative analysis, we identify different coordination mechanisms (CM) in various practice areas as envisioned and used with the same collaboration platform by three healthcare workplace teams. The findings illustrate the flexibility of shared workspace designs of the digital workplace where CM cannot be anticipated a priori by researchers and software developers. We end with a discussion of the findings from a sociomaterial perspective to encourage studies that monitor the flexible and complex enactment of temporally emerging shared workspace designs

Trigger Points of Fear and Distrust in Human-Robot Interaction: The Case of Cooperative Manufacturing

Digital technology is becoming ubiquitous and embedded as an integrated part of our daily lives, in which the digital and the physical worlds are increasingly interconnected and intertwined. While advanced technology can provide tremendous benefits and opportunities, it can also be very complex and challenging to understand, potentially leading to fear, suspicion, and distrust. This paper investigates a case of human-robot interaction in cooperative manufacturing, focusing on understanding how operators, managers and viewers feel about cooperating with industrial robots using potentially dangerous tools like nail guns. The aim of the study is to identify how human reactions to technology-induced change can be understood. The research question is: how can different trigger points of fear or distrust in technology be understood in the context of human-robot interaction? The findings reveal three key factors in overcoming fear, creating trust and encouraging interaction: knowledge, control, and self-preservation. The main contribution is illustrated through suggested guidelines for aspects that have to be practically considered when building this type of flexible robot cell for interacting with industrial robots in a real setting

Balancing the Social Media Seesaw in Public Sector: A Sociomaterial Perspective

The use of social media in the public sector changes the professionals\u27 everyday work practice. This paper sheds light on the emerging challenges of using social media as a part of work, based on the analysis of three contexts within the public sector in Sweden and through the lens of sociomateriality and affordances. The approach is interpretive field studies with a narrative analysis, where we interpret and analyse key elements of the storylines, focusing on the transition to social media use among professionals (nurses, municipal communicators, and physicians) in the three contexts. Social media enables an open work environment where information is visible and potentially spreadable to an unknown audience. The process of interacting with an unknown audience and finding a professional tone is analysed here as context collapse. The unknown, and at times imagined complex audience, makes it hard to balance the seesaw between friendliness on the one hand and an authoritative tone on the other; a tonality which leaves most of the potential audience unreached. The interplay between social media and the professionals shapes the professionals’ practice. We analyse this interplaying practice more specifically, as sociomateriality in action

The Intersection Between Information Systems and Workplace Learning: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Information Systems (IS) research has extensively studied change in relation to digitalization. However, less attention has been paid to both individual and organizational change from a learning perspective. There is a need for a deeper understanding of how changes are fostered and how and why learning in the circumstances of digital practices occurs. This interdisciplinary systematic review shows how workplace learning has been addressed within IS, bringing together workplace learning theories and the field of IS. The results show that research on the role of knowledge in IS tends to rely on established and conventional theories without explicitly articulating the learning aspects. We call for more IS research that explicitly addresses digital change as learning. This paper provides a research agenda via three research directions for IS researchers interested in work and learning, aiming for a theoretical discussion to advance our field

Invisible Work Meets Visible Work: Infrastructuring from the Perspective of Patients and Healthcare Professionals

Increased patient engagement and the use of new types of data, such as patient-generated health data (PGHD) is shifting how work is performed in relation to healthcare. This change enables healthcare professionals to delegate parts of work previously conducted by them to patients. There is a consensus regarding the need for nurses and physicians to work seamlessly together to make healthcare flow, but the role and responsibility of patients are less researched. In this paper, we aim to fill that gap by focusing on the shift of work from healthcare professionals to patients from the perspective of i) patients and ii) healthcare professionals. We use infrastructuring as a lens to understand the design of everyday work and actions from both perspectives. The main contribution is an analysis of, and insights into, how the work of patients can support healthcare professionals along with a conceptualization of how infrastructuring processes within and outside of healthcare are interconnected

Digital Work : Coping with Contradictions in Changing Healthcare

Digital work is bringing significant change to all professions, as established work settings are replaced by remote work and digital teamwork and collaboration. Contradictions arise when work is no longer bounded in time or space and personal and professional life merge. This raises several issues. The issues include control of time, professional boundaries, and privacy and security. Healthcare is one area where digital technology is a growing influence on professional work, roles, and relationships. The medical profession demands constant learning as it undergoes accelerating advancements in both medicine and technology. This has the effect of a change in patient-physician relationships as patients access medical information on public sites and interact with providers outside the clinical setting.The research documents the effects of professional use of multiple technologies to interact, share knowledge, and coordinate. The research problem therefore addresses the blending of personal and professional technology use in healthcare specifically and the public sector in general, focusing on the impact of digitally engaged patients on practice.The aim of the thesis is to explore dimensions of digital work that arise from the use of digital technologies in daily work and learning, with a focus on the professional role of physicians. It poses the following research questions: RQ1) What opportunities and challenges do physicians experience from using digital technologies for work and learning and how do they view their role and expertise in relation to informed and digitally engaged patients? And RQ2) What does the analysis reveal about thecharacteristics of digital work, and its implications for professionalism? The topic covers dynamics between information, technology, and people, in the context of work and learning in healthcare. Therefore, the perspectives guiding the research lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines, like Information Systems, workplace learning and health informatics. The thesis adopts a sociotechnical approach wherein the concept of information system is understood broadly to comprise information content, social context, and specific technologies. For the analysis of the research data, it combines workplace learning theories with concepts from the information infrastructure, and infrastructuring literature to identify and analyze characteristics and contradictions of digital work. The thesis comprises five peer-reviewed research papers. The data comes from 15 semi-structured interviews, three focus groups and a survey of 148 Swedish resident physicians. The project is informed by an engaged research approach, including observations from longitudinal collaborative research, and development projects that involved physicians and other public sector professionals. By exploring and describing physicians’ interactions with multiple digital technologies as part of everyday work, the thesis responds to calls for research to capture the sociotechnical dimensions and effects of digital technologies on work beyond traditional standalone systems. It addresses a real-world problem that public sector healthcare faces, by providing contextual details and insights into how digital health technology and public information intervene in the patient-physician relationship. The findings suggest that digital work can be understood as a process of coping with contradictions, where physicians reconfigure professionalism through ongoing efforts to embrace the new forms of work without sacrificing core values. The thesis concludes with guidelines to address the transformation of professional roles and responsibilities, the new qualities and competencies required for digital work, and the need for interdisciplinary research and consideration of diverse perspectives for an appropriate design of sociotechnical medical systems

THE EMERGENCE OF SHARING AND GAINING KNOWLEDGE: TOWARDS SMARTWORK IN HEALTHCARE

The subject of this research-in-progress paper is on digitalization of healthcare in relation to work and learning. The aim is to explore the introduction of social technologies for collaboration and knowledge sharing at work. The empirical data is from a pilot study in the Swedish healthcare sector, involving emergency resident physicians, medical library team, and hospital management. Preliminary findings shed lights on some of the tensions and conflicting perspectives related to the digital workplace, and how to balance between them seems to be the challenge (personal vs. professional; medical vs. administrative; flexibility vs. institutionalization). This study also indicates that there is potential for collegial collaboration, knowledge sharing, and learning and argue that better integration in daily practice and new ways of working may contribute to meet demand for health-related IT competence for healthcare staff and the benefit of patients as well

ICT and Learning in a Changing Healthcare Landscape: Challenges and Opportunities for Physicians at Work

ICT and Learning in a Changing Healthcare Landscape: Challenges and Opportunities  for Physicians at Work(Long Abstract)</p