Development of systems for support of collaboration in health care: the design arenas

To explore the design of computer-supported collaborative work in health care, a case study is described addressing the social contexts and conditions influencing the development process. The data set covers 13 consequtive meetings held in a systems design group over a 2-year period, in total approximately 24 h of video recordings. Subjectivist methods are used for the data analyses. The results suggest that the development of computer-supported collaborative work in health care is situated at three social arenas: the societal arena, the organizational arena and the workplace arena. These are visited by the design group in patterns which correspond to the micro-, meso- and macro-level social structures involved in the design. The study displays that longitudinal analyses of design meeting dialogues provide the opportunity of improving the understanding of external influences on design processes in health care. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.