Thursday, November 14, 2019

Patient Records & Patient Subjectivity Research - Two Pathways




 Patient Medical Records Research Projects Pathways

 Two Research Teams:  Health Insurance Team | Medical Research Team


Where?
Domain (or Field)
Who? Subjects (Kinds of People)
When?
Which specific objects of inquiry?
How inequalities get set up.

   --------->
Specific Object of Inquiry
Health Care Insurance
Patients
(& their cognates)
both
Early 20th (00s-30s)
and
Post-war (50s-70s)
Subjectivity


   --------->
??Insurance Contracts & Standards
+
Patient Records
Hospital Research


   --------->

??Research Data
+
Patient Records









Other possible vectors/categories listed below… (not a current research focus)

Clinic
Doctors



Doctors v Nurses

Journals & Conferences
Hospital
Nurses


Power
Gender Inequalities

Textbooks
Law
Researchers

Late 20th century

Racial Inequalites

Insurance Contracts
Econ/Mkt

Records Clerks


Class/SES Inequalities

Legal Docs
Gov’t



Knowledge





Early Modern






Mid 19th Century








Thursday, November 7, 2019

Questions (more) about medical records coming out of Berg & Bowker

How did the medical record come to mediate its _______ ?


What domain(s) are our focus?  The clinical setting.  Hospital.  Insurance setting (health, life, malpractice?).  Research setting.  Legal setting (e.g.,, malpractice). Educational.  Governmental. Economics.  Public health.


Who is our focus?  What kinds of subjects Patients Professionals.


How do the records set up terrains of inequality?  E.g., between doctors and nurses, or between differently-gendered patients, or other differently-classed patients? access inequality. legal accountabilities.


When is our focus?  Early modern? 19th century (esp. professionalization).  Early twentieth-century?  Post-war period?  Late-20th century?


Which is our primary category of analysis (just to start)?  Power KnowledgeSubjectivity?


                  Falling out of the above.... we might get our object of inquiry.


Specific objects of inquiry (what technologies/techno-practices?): early standardized medical records (when?); medical records textbooks (when were the first ones written?); insurance company reports?; legal documents (public case records)

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Questions about medical records coming out of reading of Focuault


The Patient Question: [When does the subject who goes to the hospital to be cured change?  Who is going to hospitals?  When and why?  What kind of persons do we have on hospital beds?  When are they 'patients'?]

Subject of Medicine Question:  [When does the subject begin to be defined by these medical records?  When are persons, and not just patients, medicalized?  Relatedly, when do medical records become privileged?]

Medical Records Questions:  [When do medical records begin to be preserved within hospitals? Standardized to an extent so they can be distributed between different hospitals?  Summarizable so they can be extended to other domains/practices (i.e., medical records used in education, in criminal court, in insurance contracts, in epidemeology)?  These other domains/practices might be a possible entry in.]

Technical function of medical records technology:  [Who is compiling the medical records?  Nurses?  Medical secretaries?  What is their knowledge, role, and technological function?  Training manuals as a possible entry in.]

 Framing Question: What literature should our analysis be framed through?  Who is our audience?  What disciplines and/or journals do we want to speak to?


One possible hunch (but just a hunch at this point): [If the medicalization of the hospital was an effect/strategy (?) of 18th c. disciplinary power, then the medicalization of the person-become-patient was an effect/strategy (?) of 20th c. infopolitical documentation.]