Abstract

Healthcare is a complex system under great pressure for meeting the patients' needs.Implementing technology at inpatient wards might possibly support healthcare professionalsand improve quality of care. However, these technologies might come withissues and the system might not be used as intended.

This master thesis project investigates how healthcare professionals communicateat an inpatient ward and how this might be affected by implementing a MobileHealthcare Solution (MHS). Further, it sought to question why healthcare professionsmight, or might not, use the MHS as a support of their daily work and whatsome reasons for this might be. Research methods were of qualitative approach.Field studies were performed at an inpatient ward and further, two healthcare professionalswere interviewed. Grounded Theory (GT) was chosen as a method toprocess the data and obtain understanding for communication at the inpatient ward.

The results showed that healthcare professionals communicate verbally, written andby reading, using different tools. The most prominent ways of communication wereverbally, where it was common to report or discuss about a patient. The means forcommunication did not get drastically affected by implementing the MHS and reasonsfor this were of social, technical and organizational types. Some reasons for notusing the MHS were habits and due to healthcare professionals perceiving the MHSas more time consuming than manual handling. However, a specic investigation of whether this might affect the usage of the MHS is yet needed.

Keywords: Mobile Healthcare Solutions, Electronic Health Records, HealthcareInnovation System, User and Implementation, Ethnographyii