Unintended Consequences Of Electronic Medical Records: An Emergency Room Ethnography Hardcover

New

Barbara Cook Overton

Unintended Consequences of Electronic Medical Records: An Emergency Room Ethnography argues that, while electronic medical records (EMRs) were supposed to improve health care delivery, EMRs' unintended consequences have affected emergency medicine providers and patients in alarming ways. Higher health care costs, decreased physician productivity, increased provider burnout, lower levels of patient satisfaction, and more medical mistakes are just a few of the unintended consequences Barbara Cook Overton observes while studying one emergency room's EMR adoption. With data collected over six years, Cook Overton demonstrates how EMRs harm health care organizations and thrust providers into the midst of incompatible rule systems without appropriate strategies for coping with these challenges, thus robbing them of agency. Using structuration theory and its derivatives to frame her analysis, Cook Overton explores ways providers communicatively and performatively receive and manage EMRs in emergency rooms. Scholars of communication and medicine will find this book particularly useful.

9781498567459

English

Lexington Books

27-Dec-19

280

Barbara Cook Overton holds a PhD in communication studies from Louisiana State University.

Barbara Cook Overton's new examination of communication in U.S. Emergency Departments, Unintended Consequences of Electronic Medical Records: An Emergency Room Ethnography is a superb description and analysis of the real world difficulties the requirement for EMRs created for Emergency Department (ED) teams. This new book uses participant observation, thick description, as well as interviews of ED providers, to illustrate the problems adoption of EMRs have presented to staffs, patients, and hospitals.--Michael P. Pagano, Fairfield University