 Disciplined doctors: The electronic medical record and physicians' changing relationship to medical knowledgeAdam Reich Social Science & Medicine, 2012, vol. 74, issue 7, 1021-1028 Abstract: This study explores the effects of the electronic medical record (EMR) on the power of the medical profession. It is based on twenty-five in-depth interviews with administrators and physicians across three departments of a large, US integrated health system, as well as ethnographic observation, all of which took place between September of 2009 and December of 2010. While scholarship on professional power has tended toward the opposite poles of professional dominance and deprofessionalization or proletarianization, I find that doctors' interactions with the EMR reconcile these perspectives by making physicians' professional identities consistent with their subordination to bureaucratic authority. After examining the electronic medical record as a disciplinary technology, the paper analyzes variation in the extent to which practitioners' professional identities are reconciled with bureaucratic subordination across the different departments studies. Keywords: USA; Hospitals; Physicians; Culture; Information technology; Evidence-based medicine; Medical records; Power (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:74:y:2012:i:7:p:1021-1028 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.12.032 Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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