Computerised Care for Diabetic Patients at CADA: An Analysis of the Relationship with a Social Innovation in a Hospital Environment

Abstract

This article, which focuses on the computerisation of care for diabetic patients, analyses the relationship with a social innovation in the hospital environment at the Abidjan Anti-Diabetic Centre (CADA). The aim is to highlight the social logic of a denunciation of innovation in the patient-caregiver relationship through the Visiomed project. This article, which focuses on the computerisation of care for diabetic patients, analyses the relationship with social innovation in the hospital environment at the Abidjan Anti-Diabetic Centre (CADA). It sets out to highlight the social logic of a denunciation of innovation in the patient-caregiver relationship through the Visiomed project. The analysis focuses on the reconfiguration of patient-caregiver relationships, the social representations associated with the innovation, the trajectories of computerisation and management linked to the Visiomed project, and the issues and challenges of maintaining patients in the face of the innovation. The discussion of the results shows that the denunciation or rejection of the Visiomed innovation by the patient can be explained by the distancing of the Agent-Patient relationship, the differentiated representations that patients have of the attributes of technological innovation, associated with this computerisation of care monitoring through the Visiomed project. Moreover, these differentiated representations of the innovation are the product of the reconfiguration of the relationships between the health agents of the Antidiabetic Centre and their patients in the social field of communication.