Health Information Management: Integrating Information Technology ...

THE CONTEXTUAL NATURE OF INFORMATION 77
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1 Find and discuss pieces of information generated in the primary care
process, and discuss the (im)possibilities to use this information for
different, secondary purposes.
2 Similarly, discuss what extra detail, context, etc. has to be added to
this information in order to be able to fulfil a role in a secondary
context.
3 What do you think of the often heard ambitions to create ‘paperless’
hospitals or wards?
4 So-called ‘natural language processing systems’ attempt to ‘code’
information entered in free-text mode automatically, often without the
user’s intervention. Does this imply that the tension between the
advantages of ‘free text entry’ and the requirement of standardization
of terminology is resolved?
REFERENCES
Cicourel, A. (1990) The integration of distributed knowledge in collaborative medical
diagnosis. In J.Galegher, R.E.Kraut and C.Egido (eds), Intellectual Teamwork.
Social and Intellectual Foundations of Cooperative Work, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, pp. 221–42.
Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association (1993) Users and uses
of patient records, Archives of Family Medicine 2:678–81.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood-Cliffs, N.Y.: PrenticeHall.
Hunter, K.M. (1991) Doctors’ Stories. The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Levitt, J.I. (1994) Why physicians continue to reject the computerized medical record,
Minnesota Medicine 77:17–21.
McDonald, C.J. (1992) Physician’s needs for computer-based patient records. In M.J. Ball
and M.F.Collen (eds), Aspects of the Computer-based Patient Record, New York:
Springer, pp. 3–11.
van der Lei, J. (1991) Use and abuse of computer-stored medical records [editorial],
Methods of Information in Medicine 30:79–80.
FURTHER READING
On the nature of information and task-oriented communication
Agre, P.E. (1995) Institutional circuitry: thinking about the forms and uses of
information, Information Technology and Libraries 14:225–30.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood-Cliffs, N.Y.: PrenticeHall.
Garrod, S. (1998) How groups co-ordinate their concepts and terminology: implications
for medical informatics, Methods of Information in Medicine 37:471–6.