Disciplined doctors: The electronic medical record and physicians' changing relationship to medical knowledge

Abstract

This study explores the effects of the electronic medical record (EMR) on the power of the medical profession. It is based on twenty-five in-depth interviews with administrators and physicians across three departments of a large, US integrated health system, as well as ethnographic observation, all of which took place between September of 2009 and December of 2010. While scholarship on professional power has tended toward the opposite poles of professional dominance and deprofessionalization or proletarianization, I find that doctors' interactions with the EMR reconcile these perspectives by making physicians' professional identities consistent with their subordination to bureaucratic authority. After examining the electronic medical record as a disciplinary technology, the paper analyzes variation in the extent to which practitioners' professional identities are reconciled with bureaucratic subordination across the different departments studies.