Martin Burns
Thesis title:
The development and dissemination of specialist and generic electronic patient record systems in an era of patient-centred healthcare
Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) have for several decades been seen as having the potential to deliver great benefits including: integrated information flows, enhanced management information, better access to patient data for secondary purposes such as research and, ultimately, improved patient care. Whilst EPRs are common in primary care, the kind of hospital wide, generic EPR systems that have often been envisaged by policy makers have proved more difficult to implement in an acute setting. Instead there has been a growth of specialist EPRs in areas such as cancer and renal care. However following the winding down of the National Programme for IT in England, many NHS acute hospital trusts are looking afresh at implementing hospital wide generic EPRs.
My PhD aims to examine the different interests that multiple stakeholders such as patients, clinicians, administrators, managers, IT staff and systems developers have in the development and dissemination of both specialist and generic systems and how these developments are being justified in terms of supporting patient-centred care.
I am taking a socio-technical approach using qualitative methods to develop a case study of the different stakeholder interests at play in an English NHS acute trust that has several existing specialist EPR systems and is in the process of implementing a Trust-wide generic EPR system. I am particularly interested in how these different systems can help support a patient-centred approach to care provision especially where a patient's care crosses traditional specialty or organisational boundaries.
Supervisors:
Professor Flis Henwood
Dr Mary Darking
