Electronic Communication between Citizens and Healthcare Practitioners: An Analysis of Practitioner Reported Obstacles

In this paper we document and analyze experiences and perspectives of Norwegian healthcare practitioners on citizen-oriented, electronic services. The electronic services include: booking appointments, renewing prescriptions, contacting healthcare providers, and getting e-consultations. Our study is based on the analysis of responses to a survey addressed to General Practitioner offices throughout Norway. We analyzed free-text responses from 156 doctors and 109 secretarial staff that already offer electronic services. The analytical framework for our study is based on the normalization process model (NPM) which focuses on factors that promote or inhibit routine embedding of technological interventions in existing work settings. The analysis reveals that the obstacles reported by healthcare practitioners relate mostly to exogenous (organizing) factors and workability (associated to the overall affordances of the technology implemented: asynchronous, text-based) and not to the specificities of the applications in place.

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