Remote Doctors and Absent Patients: Acting at a Distance in Telemedicine?

Mort, Maggie, May, Carl and Finch, Tracy (2003) Remote Doctors and Absent Patients: Acting at a Distance in Telemedicine? Science, Technology, & Human Values, 28 (2). pp. 274-295. ISSN 0162-2439

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Abstract

According to policy makers, telemedicine offers “huge opportunities to improve the quality and accessibility of health services.” It is defined as diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, with doctors and patients separated by space (and usually time) but mediated through information and communication technologies. This mediation is explored through an ethnography of a U.K. teledermatology clinic. Diagnostic image transfer enables medicine at a distance, as patients are removed from knowledge generation by concentrating their identities into images. Yet that form of identity allows images and the expert gaze to be brought into potentially lifesaving proximity. Following Latour’s thread, images must be captured and then mobilized to the knowledge base, where they must be stabilized into standard diagnoses, then combined with different images, waiting lists, skin lesions, dermatologists, paper records, and beds, so that ultimately, outcomes are produced. This huge task requires new knowledges and a widening of agency that, if unacknowledged, may see telemedicine projects continue to founder.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Tracy Finch published as Tracy Williams.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	telemedicine, inscription, affordances, patienthood
Subjects:	B900 Others in Subjects allied to Medicine
Depositing User:	Becky Skoyles
Date Deposited:	12 Dec 2017 11:40
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 22:18
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/32807

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