Evaluating the Impact of Technological Change in a Critical Care Unit

Abstract

The increased use of health information technology in hospitals brings with it a growing need to appreciate the contexts in which health information technology may be used. Information flow and workflow are directly affected by the implementation of such technology. We present first steps towards a method that will help stakeholders evaluate the impact of technological change on work practice sufficiently early to influence the design and deployment of such technology. By using models of information flow and workflow based on how work actually occurs, analysts may better understand the relationships between the healthcare work and the proposed technological change. Models must be descriptive of healthcare work, must help the analyst evaluate work, and must help the analyst make conjectures about change. In this paper we evaluate whether the model notation is ready for testing with representative analysts, to see if the models help them envision the effects of technologies on work.