On the materiality of boundary objects in knowledge management

Abstract

In most health systems, patient information is available in both analog and digital formats and helps to simplify collaboration across disciplinary and departmental boundaries. Based on data from ethnographic fieldwork on patient information management (PIM), we applied the concept of boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989) to analyze the collaborative management of patient health records through analog and digital artifacts in a complex socio-technical work system. Our results indicate that a dichotomous classification into analog and digital boundary objects (Fong et al., 2007) can be enhanced by a third category to understand and support PIM in a hospital context.