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03 May 2010: Prof. Rob Stones' work on 'Big IT' in healthcare published

Prof. Rob Stones work on ‘Theorising Big IT Programmes in Healthcare: Strong Structuration Theory Meets Actor Network Theory’, (with Trisha Greenhalgh) has been published in Social Science and Medicine, Volume 70, Issue 9, May 2010, Pages 1285-1294.

Despite the millions spent on researching healthcare IT systems around the world, the research community has yet to resolve basic questions such as whether big IT (and particularly, densely networked distributed records) will make healthcare more seamless, efficient, patient-centred and safe or more fragmented, time-consuming, technology-centred and risky.

In response the paper seeks to develop a sharper theoretical perspective on the question “What happens – at macro-, meso- and micro-level – when government tries to modernise a health service with the help of big IT?”. Drawing on Stone's strong stucturation theory and actor-network theory the paper shows how human agents, with their complex socio-cultural frames, are required to instantiate technology in social practices. Structurally relevant properties inscribed and embedded in technological artefacts constrain and enable human agency. Thus the fortunes of healthcare IT programmes might be usefully studied in terms of the interplay between these factors.

Stones and Greenhalgh suggest that their theoretical synthesis may be able to support informed judgements on the planning, design and implementation of these systems.