Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Remote doctors and absent patients: acting at a distance in telemedicine?
AU - Mort, Maggie M.
AU - May, Carl R.
AU - Williams, Tracy
N1 - RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : Social Work and Social Policy & Administration
PY - 2003/3/1
Y1 - 2003/3/1
N2 - According to policy makers, telemedicine offers "huge opportunities to improve the quality and accessibility of health services." It is defined as diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, with doctors and patients separated by space (and usually time) but mediated through information and communication technologies. This mediation is explored through an ethnography of a U.K. teledermatology clinic. Diagnostic image transfer enables medicine at a distance, as patients are removed from knowledge generation by concentrating their identities into images. Yet that form of identity allows images and the expert gaze to be brought into potentially lifesaving proximity. Following Latour’s thread, images must be captured and then mobilized to the knowledge base, where they must be stabilized into standard diagnoses, then combined with different images, waiting lists, skin lesions, dermatologists, paper records, and beds, so that ultimately, outcomes are produced. This huge task requires new knowledges and a widening of agency that, if unacknowledged, may see telemedicine projects continue to founder.
AB - According to policy makers, telemedicine offers "huge opportunities to improve the quality and accessibility of health services." It is defined as diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, with doctors and patients separated by space (and usually time) but mediated through information and communication technologies. This mediation is explored through an ethnography of a U.K. teledermatology clinic. Diagnostic image transfer enables medicine at a distance, as patients are removed from knowledge generation by concentrating their identities into images. Yet that form of identity allows images and the expert gaze to be brought into potentially lifesaving proximity. Following Latour’s thread, images must be captured and then mobilized to the knowledge base, where they must be stabilized into standard diagnoses, then combined with different images, waiting lists, skin lesions, dermatologists, paper records, and beds, so that ultimately, outcomes are produced. This huge task requires new knowledges and a widening of agency that, if unacknowledged, may see telemedicine projects continue to founder.
KW - telemedicine • inscription • affordances • patienthood
U2 - 10.1177/0162243902250907
DO - 10.1177/0162243902250907
M3 - Journal article
VL - 28
SP - 274
EP - 295
JO - Science, Technology, and Human Values
JF - Science, Technology, and Human Values
SN - 0162-2439
IS - 2
ER -