Towards Digitally Empowered Diabetes Clinics: How Healthcare Providers Shape the Adoption of New Technology [PhD Project]
Medical technologies enable better, more democratized, potentially cheaper, care. However, related practices disrupt organizational routines, professional ways of working and instigate change to organizational forms. While the widespread implementation of technology requires efforts across insurers, policymakers, managers and device makers, many implementation and usage issues occur in the clinical setting. In this project, we investigate how professionals adopt devices and clinics adapt to technologically mediated diabetes care.
Photo: www.diabetesplus.nl
Novel medical devices are driving a paradigm shift toward personalized, precise care, but too often the promise exceeds reality. Diabetes care is an important revelatory case for understanding and enabling professionals and clinics to meet the expectation raised to their audiences (insurers, customers, device manufacturers etceteraa).
New devices capture people with diabetes’ (PWD) continuous glucose levels via sensors and send data to software; some administer insulin directly in response. When technical benefits are known, but adoption lags, psychology can surface motivations and attitudes and institutional analysis can help us to understand the not always ‘rational’ barriers and enablers, including professional role shifts and organizational cultural fit.
We combine organizational expertise in healthcare contexts and professions (Dr. Metz) with expertise about diabetes technologies and psychology (Dr. Nefs); and learning and innovation (Prof. dr. Meeus). This collaboration will allow us to look seriously at individual level practices with tools from psychology, and also place practices and in the broader organizational context. Integrating our different levels of expertise will provide novel views on the complex problem of professional adaptiveness to new technologies, which has not yet been studied properly because it requires such integration. This is urgent because the pace of technology development will only continue or accelerate, but if HCPs ‘stay behind,’ PWD, clinics and careers will face disadvantages.
The Research team
- Ashley Metz
- Giesje Nefs
- Marius Meeus
Cross-cutting themes
The Herbert Simon Research Institute for Health, Well-being, and Adaptiveness is a research center devoted to carrying out excellent, state of the art research in order to contribute to healthy and resilient people. We have selected three themes, which involve the collaboration between various Departments and address actual themes in need of both fundamental and applied research.