Unraveling the socio-cognitive perspective: adoption of innovation in a public funded hospital

The history of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is replete with digital interventions which have either failed or been abandoned midway. When analyzing these interventions, complexities within the NHS are often cited as central to abandonment or non-adoption. Our objective was to investigate how multifarious rationales and perspectives can still facilitate adoption of a new technology in a public sector hospital. We undertook an ethnographic study to investigate how doctors, nurses and pharmacists collectively ‘make sense’ when facing the implementation of electronic medicine charts (EMEDs). We have investigated how each of these groups interactively work to understand novel, ambiguous and unexpected events arounds them underpinning the implementation process. The resulting dimensions represent a collective cognitive transformation wherein the groups transition from fearing to capturing value and eventually rationalizing the use of new technology.