Management Revue (MREV) is published by IMR Press from Volume 36 Issue 1 (2025). Previous articles were published by another publisher under the CC-BY licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement.
Digital Transformations in Healthcare Professionals’ Work: Dynamics of Autonomy, Control and Accountability
Christian Huber 1,*
, Christian Gärtner 2
, Christian Gärtner 2Affiliations
Article Info
1 Department of Management Accounting and Control, Helmut Schmidt University, Holstenhofweg 85, 22043 Hamburg
2 Professor of Business Administration with a focus on Digital Transformation & Leadership, Quadriga University of Applied Sciences, Berlin
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Digital technologies and the standards underlying them are omnipresent in healthcare. Despite a wealth of knowledge about the relation between standards and issues of autonomy, control and accountability in professional work, we know much less about how digital technologies alter these relations. To address this gap, we present the findings of an in-depth qualitative case study in a medium-sized German hospital and its hospital information system (HIS) with a particular focus on the operating room (OR)-module used in the operating rooms. Conceptually, we draw on the notion of digital objects which allows studying information entities as well as visualizations that represent information entities and their relations in a visual gestalt (e. g. coloured boxes that represent surgeries on a timetable). We found that during ‘normal’ situations, digital objects influenced professional work towards conforming with professional standards. During ‘hot’ situations such as emergencies, however, pro