Ethnographic fieldwork on Medical Information Systems

Abstract
 David Martin will report on his hospital, medical information systems fieldwork. He will present on it and address a couple of questions that come to mind such as:1. What constitutes an ethnographic study, versus a field study or simply observation? 2. What should be the materials for analysis and how does this relate to the analytic technique - e.g. ethnomethodology? 3. How do the 2 above relate to 'setting' - where setting encompasses both 'constrained' fieldsites like control rooms and mobile environments 4. Like always - the relationship between study and design.

CV
David Martin is a research associate in the Computing Department at Lancaster University. He has worked at Lancaster since completing his PhD - ethnomethodology and systems design: interaction at the boundaries of organisations - at Manchester University in 2000. His research interests lie in carrying out ethnographic and ethnomethodological studies of work and social action and subsequently using these studies to provide suggestions for the design of technologies to better support those activities. He has carried out studies in a wide variety of settings such as ambulance control, banks and financial institutions, local council offices and healthcare settings. He is currently engaged in two projects. The first project looks at dependability in complex socio-technical systems. The second is directed at looking at the implications for the design of integrated electronic health records. For this he is currently studying a project team working at developing electronic patients records in a UK hospital. It is this work that he will present on for this seminar.