Implementing Disruptive Technological Change in UK Healthcare: Exploring the Development of a Smart Phone App for Remote Patient Monitoring as a Boundary Object

Bresnen, MJ, Sharp, C, Dixon, W, Sanders, C, Austin, L, McCarthy, J and Howard, S (2018) Implementing Disruptive Technological Change in UK Healthcare: Exploring the Development of a Smart Phone App for Remote Patient Monitoring as a Boundary Object. In: 34th EGOS Colloquium, 05 July 2018 - 07 July 2018, Tallinn, Estonia.

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Abstract

Developing and applying technological innovations in healthcare is a complex and uncertain process, due to the many surprising and unexpected effects upon the practices, perspectives and interests of the variety of professional and managerial stakeholders involved. In this paper, we draw upon the concept of boundary object to explore processes of collaboration, knowledge transformation and learning associated with the development, use and (prospective) wider diffusion in the English healthcare system of a particular type of healthcare innovation: a smart phone app for use by rheumatoid arthritis patients. Taking into account that technological artefacts can both enable and inhibit collaboration, as well as evolve during their development, we explore the challenges of overcoming tensions between the transformative and learning capabilities of such technological artefacts and the inhibitions that these capabilities simultaneously create for change at a wider system level.