Investigating Mobile Messaging in Healthcare Organizations: A Sensemaking Perspective

Hospitals are adopting advanced messaging systems to facilitate communication among healthcare personnel with the aim of improving patient care. However, users face various challenges in employing these systems, with serious consequences of miscommunication. Nevertheless, past studies on healthcare messaging systems tend to be descriptive with a lack of theoretically grounded and empirical validated research to explain their nature of use. Motivated thus, we study the usage patterns of a web-based messaging system (WMS) in the context of a public hospital. Using media synchronicity and sensemaking theories, we explain how healthcare personnel on the move use WMS to make sense of their work for achieving a shared understanding for patient care. Through a preliminary content analysis of the WMS messages during a month, our results showed salient differences in the usage patterns of different user groups and for different kinds of sensemaking. The study's potential contributions and future plan are discussed.

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