Law and Technology in Healthcare Organizations

ABSTRACT: Over the past century, innovation in medical technology has yielded dramatic advances in clinical care, and newly emerging technologies promise to improve patient care and population health still further. To understand these technologies’ cycles of development and adoption, however, we cannot focus solely on the products themselves. Rather we must consider technological innovation as a social process that occurs within the larger healthcare context — a context that extends far beyond discrete incidents of clinical care. By situating technological innovation within a larger understanding of this institutional terrain, this chapter sheds new light on when and how healthcare innovations languish or diffuse, enhance or disrupt.

Our focus on law, healthcare, and technology places this inquiry at the intersection of three institutional sectors, three professional domains and, by extension, three academic literatures. Therefore, to create a unified framework for understanding the relationship between law and technology in the healthcare sector, we draw upon literatures that have developed largely separately within each domain. However, we do so with an eye toward identifying the cross-cutting interactions that give this intersection its distinctive character.

The conceptual framework underlying our review is a 2x2 typology: the first dimension distinguishes technologies that are consistent with prior institutional commitments versus technologies that are disruptive of prior institutional commitments; the second dimension distinguishes technologies that are designed for clinical use in the immediate therapeutic encounter versus technologies that are designed for administrative use in the broader enterprise of healthcare provision. We illustrate this typology by examining the role of law in supporting, limiting or challenging recent technological developments in the United States.

Cite as: Brennan, Elizabeth and Mark C. Suchman (2020), “Law and Technology in Healthcare Organizations,” pp. 169-190 in M. Jacob & A. Kirkland (eds.), Research Handbook on Socio-Legal Studies of Medicine and Health. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.