In business thinking, ‘core competencies’ have long been seen as the critical factor that distinguishes great from good. Great companies have strong core competencies that they constantly leverage and develop. On the other hand, companies who do not understand their own strengths and weaknesses...
In 2009, a health care service organization in Hawaii launched a online medical consultation program intent to serve the needs of clients in rural Oahu and the neighboring islands, which faced increasing shortages of primary care clinicians. Patients could go online for medical advice from on-call...
Ethnography and clinical research appear fundamentally disparate, even conflicting. Their very objectives are dichotomous – the latter moves molecules ‘from the lab to consumer market’ in controlled environments, while the former studies the uncontrolled environment of everyday life. However, with...
This paper, based on a fieldwork conducted with community transport projects in rural Ireland, examines the place of mobility in the lives of older people. It uses the idea of journey to explore what mobility means to older people, what the research made visible to a diverse range of project...
A study of the practices surrounding paper medical records captured key aspects of the work necessary to support this crucial element of health care. It uncovered work that was invisible to the nurses and physicians who use the records. This invisible work comprises tasks necessary to find and...
![The Invisible Work of Being a Patient and Implications for Health Care: “[The Doctor Is] My Business Partner in the Most Important Business in My Life, Staying Alive”](https://www.epicpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/sam-T2r9oWS-NDQ-unsplash-scaled-e1693362877450-1080x675.jpg)
In a distributed system of care, patients shuffle among many clinicians and spend the majority of their time away from the treatment center. Although we see the results of patients’ work (e.g., medication taken, arrived at appointment) we do not see the work itself. By failing to see this...
Researchers at EPIC face something of a trap. Situated in an ethos of twenty first century consumer capitalism, our professional duties overemphasize individual consumers, and the products of our research always diverge towards our respective corporations’ interests. As a result we have little...