Prompt 5 (Blakeslee p. 113): Observing a setting
I am planning to use a general physicians’ waiting room as a site for my research. Other potential sites would include different types of waiting rooms, but I am limited to these lobby areas by the scope of my research. The general physician’s office, in particular, is advantageous because I am interested in studying people’s constructions of themselves as patients and examining my observations in relation to gender. The GP’s office, then, is least likely to inflict inherent bias depending on the special treatment patients might be seeking in other settings. This site does pose a challenge in regard to privacy concerns, which I discussed in a non-prompted post below.
I do not feel comfortable doing an observation of a waiting room without having first considered the privacy implications with the help of the IRB committee. I can, however, work based on my observations picked up as a patient myself. Based on the continuing flow of patients and the conspicuousness of someone writing in a waiting room, I suspect that I will use a traditional observation notebook for my research. A tape-recorded log is out of the question because of Illinois laws involving audio tapes; in-the-middle and after-the-fact notes are unnecessary. The two-notebook approach seems burdensome and conspicuous in this setting. Either a traditional or dialogic notebook might work; I favor the traditional because I believe it will help me to record as objectively as possible and reserve analysis for later.
Prompt 6 (Blakeslee p. 118): Looking at how others analyze artifacts
This response refers to:
Lawrence, D. “Cashing in on check-in: As hospitals face steeper challenges in collecting fees for service, bringin the revenue cycle to the kiosk may be an answer.” Healthcare informatics 27.1 (2010): 18, 20.
This prompt was difficult for me to respond to because I have so far been unable to find work in the genre I’ll be writing in on check-in kiosks. The article referenced above reads more like a newspaper or magazine report. Therefore, the texts used as artifacts in this article are primarily interviews with experts. It is also obvious that Lawrence has developed some familiarity with the technologies he discusses–kiosks and tablets–themselves. Lawrence relied on these sources because they were primary sources that did not require significant investments of his time, which is appropriate to the genre in which he is writing. Again adhering to genre, he largely refrained from personally analyzing them, but used expert testimony to frame these technologies in terms of revenue and legal precedent on billing patients for services. His discoveries from this analysis are as follows (verbatim from the article’s conclusion):
- Kiosks are expected to become more interactive in terms of the revenue cycle.
- Consent forms and way-finding are the more traditional uses of kiosks.
- The emergency room is an ideal place to use kiosk or tablet technology because of the long waits.
- Using tablets before a full kiosk implementation is a sound strategy.
Erin Clark Frost 