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Disruptive Innovation in Health Care: Business Models, Moral Orders and Electronic Records

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2013

Karin Garrety ,
Ian McLoughlin  and
Gregor Zelle
Karin Garrety
Affiliation:
School of Management and Marketing, University of Wollongong E-mail: karin@uow.edu.au
Ian McLoughlin
Affiliation:
Department of Management, Monash University E-mail: Ian.McLoughlin@monash.edu
Gregor Zelle
Affiliation:
School of Management and Marketing, University of Wollongong E-mail: gz742@uowmail.edu.au
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Abstract

There is widespread consensus that current healthcare costs are unsustainable, and that efficiencies could be achieved by reorganising care and making greater use of information technology, in particular nationally available electronic health records. Such approaches have, however, been difficult to implement, partly because incentives for uptake are weak. In this article we argue that the difficulties go deeper than calculations of costs and benefits, and include disruptions to the complex moral orders that surround the production and exchange of health information. Using the introduction of national electronic health records in England and Australia as examples, we show how attempts to reshape and transfer distributions of rights and responsibilities developed in the age of paper into the digital world go awry. We suggest that a fundamental rethinking of the role of ‘records’ in healthcare may be an integral component of the moral re-ordering required to transform health care through such means.

Keywords

Disruptive innovationelectronic health recordsmoral orderpositioning theory
Type
Themed Section on Hiding in plain sight or Disappearing in the rear view mirror?: Whatever happened to the revolution in information for Health and Social Care – Learning from England and Australia
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 579 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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