Nurse Usage of HIS to Coordinate Work across Shifts.

Abstract

To provide continuous patient care, nurses rely on various forms of Health Information Systems (HIS) to coordinate work across shifts. While these technologies are critical for the quality of patient care, we know little about the practical challenges nurses face in making use of them when distributed across shifts. Against this backdrop, we used a social-technical design perspective grounded in organization theory to investigate how nurses used a HIS to support coordination across work shifts. We collected data by interviewing and observing nurses in their everyday work. Our analysis reveals interesting differences in how technology supported coordination, partly because of the specific coordination challenges nurses faced and because of nurses’ perception of the HIS as an enabler of coordination. We contribute to the literature on nursing in the context of work shifts with empirical insights into and a conceptual framework for studying nurses’ use of HIS across work shifts.