"Contested digitalization in the hospital: Work change, power actions and conflict constellations in the design of new technologies of medical practitioner labor processes

The technological bundle known as E-Health aims at a comprehensive transformation of business models and labor processes within hospitals. The discussed implications for qualifications and the work of doctors vary between optimistic diagnoses of new treatment possibilities and pessemistic forceasts involving deprofessionalization. In contrast, this article emphasizes the negotiability of how technology is used in the hospital. Drawing on qualitative interviews with technical decision makers and doctors at a university hospital as well as applying power approaches of a sociology of professions and the Laboor Process Theory, the article attempts to understand the (conflictive) negotiation of current digital technologies as well as different strategies of legitimation and gaining influence of these professional actors. We do this by reconstructing the use of the doctor's digital letter. It can thus be shown that the introduction of the doctor's digital letter as a key technology in EHealth srategies is intended to undermine doctors' monopoly regarding the healthcare process. Equally, though, we demonstrate that it cannot override the professional interest of them."

Support: Digital