Workarounds in healthcare information systems are everywhere you look. Ubiquitous workarounds you might say even before we've achieved ubiquitous computing! :-) Wherever there are articles about unintended consequences of healthcare information technology one is likely to see evidence of workarounds, or sadly, failures.
I'm building a list of articles that address workarounds in various contexts with the goal of developing a classification scheme. I have around 140 to date. Some are system workarounds and others are more localized to specific features.
Common Notions of Workarounds
TBD
Resistance versus learning
Workarounds as Practices
Azad and King (2008) used a practice lens orientation to study workaround practices. They presented a paper at AOM 2010 on heuristics to studying practices. One of the most challenging aspect of a practice lens is identifying the invisible. While others have pointed this out, the paper tries to explain how to make practices more visible. One of the questions from the audience was how different the approach was from interpretive research philsophy outlined in Orlikowsi and Baroudi (1991). Wanda Orlikowski happened to be in the same session and answered that this approach unpacks the processes so serves as an exemplar of the interpretive method.
Workaround Articles in Healthcare Commonly Cited
Azad B and King N (2008) Enacting computer workarounds within a medication dispensing system. European Journal of Information Systems 17(3), 264–278.
Halbesleben J R B and Rathert C (2008) The role of continuous quality improvement and psychological safety in predicting work-arounds. Health Care Management Review 33(2), 134-144.
Halbesleben J R B, Wakefield D S and Wakefield B J (2008) Work-arounds in health care settings: Literature review and research agenda. Health Care Management Review 33(1), 2-12.
Kobayashi M, Fussell S R, Xiao Y and Seagull F J (2005) Work coordination, workflow, and workarounds in a medical context CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM Portland, Oregon, USA.
Koppel R, Wetterneck T, Telles J L and Karsh B-T (2008) Workarounds to barcode medication administration systems: Their occurrences, causes, and threats to patient safety. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 15(4), 408-423.
Spear S J and Schmidhofer M (2005) Ambiguity and workarounds as contributors to medical error. Annals of Internal Medicine 142(8), 627-630.
Vogelsmeier A A, Halbesleben J R B and Scott-Cawiezell J R (2008) Technology implementation and workarounds in the nursing home. J Am Med Inform Assoc 15(1), 114-119.
Other Workaround Articles in Healthcare
---- 2009, Institutional Analysis of Persistent Computer Workarounds, Chicago.
Drum, D, Bourne, K, Claire, U-E & Standifer, R 2008, '"I Still Hate It!": Understanding Workarounds after Large It Implementations', paper presented to Midwest AIS.
Halbesleben J R B, Savage G T, Wakefield D S and Wakefield B J (2009) Rework and workarounds in medication administration processes: Implications for patient safety Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Spear S J (2005) Fixing health care from the inside, today. Harvard Business Review 83(9), 78.
Wilkerson, TW 2009, 'An Exploratory Study of the Perceived Use of Workarounds Utilized During the Prescription Preparation Process of Pharmacies in Alabama', Auburn University.
Articles that Address Workarounds in Some Other Context
Ferneley, EH & Sobreperez, P 2006, 'Resist, Comply or Workaround? An Examination of Different Facets of User Engagement with Information Systems', European Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 345-56.
Gasser, L 1986, 'The Integration of Computing and Routine Work', ACM Transactions On Office Information Systems, Vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 205 - 25.
Ignatiadis, I & Nandhakumar, J 2009, 'The Effect of ERP System Workarounds on Organizational Control: An Interpretivist Case Study', Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 59–90.