Technology Drives Organisational Change In Health Services: Artifice Or Actuality?

Medical technology, ‘the apotheosis of medical magic ’ (Lupton 1994) is idealised as central to changing practices in hospitals and self perpetuates the rising cost of providing health care to the community. Hospitals are edifices of what Baudrillard (1983) refers to as the era of ‘hyper-reality ’ in which technology and its effects are normalised to the extent that individuals view healthcare as implicitly high tech. How effective is technology in bringing about changed practices, and how sophisticated is the decision making about the organisational benefits of medical technology. In making decisions how do managers take into account social, institutional and other factors that might impinge on the effectiveness of systems and functionality of technology deployed in a hospital. To assess managerial attitudes to technological change in hospitals it is necessary to assess how managers locate technology in its broader social and economic context and whether they avoid technological determinism. This study was conducted in a large metropolitan hospital undergoing discontinuous change. A new $300 million, 525 bed hospital was designed and built to replace th