Workshops as Tools for Developing Collaborative Practice across Professional Social Worlds in Telemonitoring

Abstract

Background: Lately, patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease use telemonitoring services from home. We discuss three professional groups' idea of good care in terms of living as a chronically ill patient.

Methods: We scrutinize a workshop consisting of the following: (1) presentation of pre-workshop interviews focusing on good patient flows; (2) presentation of the participants' photos illustrating their idea of the good life with telemonitoring; (3) discussion of what the three social worlds of care can do together. We understand workshops as learning events founded on the symbolic interactionist idea of learning as reflexism. That is, the process where participants make joint action an object of attention.

Results: We propose that not only people, but also objects such as applications, gold standards, and financial arrangement are actively involved in hampering collaboration across social worlds. The contribution is a discussion of the contemporary challenges of technological intensification into healthcare processes seen as a learning event.

Conclusion: Workshops constitute useful tools to understand more of how professional groups seek to adopt new technologies and learn about the larger structure of telemonitoring. Developing joint action among social worlds appears to be one of the main challenges of technologically driven innovation in healthcare.

Keywords: COPD; care ethics; collaborative practice; joint action; learning; social world analysis; telemonitoring; workshops.

Figure 1

Appliance for measuring oxygen saturation at home.

Figure 2

App user interface, information.

Figure 3

App user interface, measurements.

Figure 4

COPD gold standards A, B, C, and D encased in plastic—symptoms and exacerbations.

Scheme 1

Flowchart illustrating sequences/tasks at the three-hour workshop.