Use of Video observations to study work practice in health informatics

Studying work practice can be very complicated in complex organizations such as health care institutions. The clinical staff has special assignments where the work is centered on people with multiple diseases, which constantly change in a non-predictable pattern. In addition to rational and formal work processes, that to a certain extend can be planned and controlled, there is a great number of informal and derived processes that are necessary to keep the organization functioning. These types of work are difficult to study by means of traditional rational analytical framework, but video based observations can be instrumental in this task. Our experience from 12 different video observation project will inspire the development of a methodological framework for video based analysis related to the different phases of a sys-tems development cycle.