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One of the most significant developments in health care over the last 25 years has been the wide spread of information and communication technologies. These technologies have a wide-ranging impact in every clinical section, on the clinical management and the accounting as well as on the work organisation, the professional practice of medical and nursing stuff and the patients’ experience of illness. On intensive care units (ICU) the implementation of information technology meets a very special context which from its beginning in the middle of the 20th century on was already highly technified. The bodily signs of the patient are electronically monitored, controlled and visualized not only at the bed-site but also in the nursing room and mechanical ventilation; dialysis equipment and other vital technologies are linked with this monitoring, too. Since a few years now patient records are also transformed in electronic data processing. Different to other non-critical wards, where this process is starting too, in the ICU electronic patient records are linked with the monitoring system as well. And all together this stationary information network is linked with the clinical management-information-system. That means, this network is not only changing medical practice, diagnostic categories and the very consultation itself. The informational network has also an extraordinary impact by restructuring the work at the ICU after accounting and management criteria e. g. Relating to my ethnographical studies in the field of intensive care I would like to show in my presentation how these digital technical restructuring-process is working and how the medical and the nursing stuff is dealing with it.

Stream: Knowledge and Technology

Paper: Between Representation, Reorganization and Control – The Informational Technification of Intensive Care Units and the Consequences