Reproducing social inequality in the National Health Information Infrastructure: A discourse analysis.

摘要

In this paper I define the problem of patient safety versus health care quality in designing a national health information infrastructure and outline a combination of methods to assist in a critical reading of a large number of Institute of Medicine reports.;The National Health Information Infrastructure/Network is an umbrella project under which much American health information technology deployment is currently discussed in political party platforms, health policy, academic health informatics research, and in private sector technology industry (National Committee on Vital & Health Statistics, 2005). This corpus is composed of a large number of reports which are narrative in nature, written by multiple authors within the Institute of Medicine from extremely diverse knowledge domains. This renders manual analysis of the social action of language in these texts very difficult and time consuming. To overcome these obstacles, I have used social constructionist and critical discourse analysis combined with corpus linguistics methods informed by value sensitive design in order to articulate a critical sociotechnical discourse analysis of the social action of language in this large number of Institute of Medicine texts.