Towards an "empowered" user role in the design of large-scale electronic patient records

Abstract

We report from a large-scale Electronic Patient Record (EPR) project in Northern Norway where the goal is to design a new type of configurable EPRs that allow users in hospitals to tailor the software to their specific needs. This ability appears to challenge the traditional user role as what we usually understand as ordinary users increasingly undertake a designer role, hence dissolving the boundaries between users and designers. Still, the configurability of the software is not straightforward as it is not obvious who is going to decide how the final design should look like, how much tailoring should be possible and in which situations.

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