Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Interprofessional Information Work: Innovations In The Use Of The Chart On Internal Medicine Teams, Lorelei Lingard, Lesley Conn, Ann Russell, Scott Reeves, Karen-Lee Miller, Chris Kenaszchuk, Merrick Zwarenstein

Lorelei Lingard

An abundance of evidence suggests that communication in interprofessional healthcare teams is a complex endeavour. Even relatively simple communication processes involving information work - the gathering, storage, retrieval and discussion of patient information - may be fraught with pitfalls, and yet teams manage to conduct their daily information work, often with a high degree of effectiveness. In this article, we explore one commonplace dimension of information work - the use of patient charts to foster collaborative decision-making and care enactment - towards building an elaborated understanding of how teams innovate in the face of daily complexities in their information work …