Identifying Communicational Errors: Organizing Health Care with E-texts.

Interpretating IT as a medium for communication and collaboration offers a way of analyzing the effect of IT in concrete practices. The users' readings determine the actual communication with the written text. A poetics of how meaning is translated from one person to another cross different locations in time and space through semiotic texts is presented, and subsequently applied as a method of analyzing and evaluating the communicative effect of an electronic care record in home care in Denmark. Paradoxes of communication are identified and discussed in relation to the practice and organizational development with the electronic record. Identifying errors of communicating through IT providesa crucial opportunity for the organization to reflect on its own working conditions and to educate clinicians to become co-authors and co-designers of ICT-devices.