Department of Communication Faculty Research
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Item Understanding Electronic Medical Record Adoption in the United States: Communication and Sociocultural Perspectives(JMIR Publications, 2013-03-26) Nambisan, Priya; Kreps, Gary L.; Polit, StanBackground: This paper adopts a communication and sociocultural perspective to analyze the factors behind the lag in electronic medical record (EMR) adoption in the United States. Much of the extant research on this topic has emphasized economic factors, particularly, lack of economic incentives, as the primary cause of the delay in EMR adoption. This prompted the Health Information Technology on Economic and Clinical Health Act that allow financial incentives through the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services for many health care organizations planning to adopt EMR. However, financial incentives alone have not solved the problem; many new innovations do not diffuse even when offered for free. Thus, this paper underlines the need to consider communication and sociocultural factors to develop a better understanding of the impediments of EMR adoption. Objective: The objective of this paper was to develop a holistic understanding of EMR adoption by identifying and analyzing the impact of communication and sociocultural factors that operate at 3 levels: macro (environmental), meso (organizational), and micro (individual). Methods: We use the systems approach to focus on the 3 levels (macro, meso, and micro) and developed propositions at each level drawing on the communication and sociocultural perspectives. Results: Our analysis resulted in 10 propositions that connect communication and sociocultural aspects with EMR adoption. Conclusions: This paper brings perspectives from the social sciences that have largely been missing in the extant literature of health information technology (HIT) adoption. In doing so, it implies how communication and sociocultural factors may complement (and in some instances, reinforce) the impact of economic factors on HIT adoption.Item Hugh S. Fullerton, the Black Sox Scandal, and the Ethical Impulse in Sports Writing(1997-05) Klein, Steven Mark; Lacy, Stephen; Rosenzweig, RoyHistory is the study of the past in all its splendid messiness, writes the historian Simon Schama. And for a baseball fan, what more splendid mess could there be than the crooked World Series of 1919? F. Scott Fitzgerald, no great baseball fan despite his friendship with Ring Lardner, found the Black Sox scandal to be the perfect metaphor for American disillusionment after World War I. Fitzgerald wrote his great American novel, The Great Gatsby, with its memorable references to the fix, within easy memory of the scandal. Fitzgerald understood that the illegitimacy of the defining event of the Great American Pastime represented the ultimate deception of American popular culture that is so well articulated in the mythology, if not the reality, of baseball. Although most sportswriters of the day had a sense that the 1919 World Series between the heavily favored Chicago White Sox and underdog Cincinnati Reds was not on the square, only one among them had the courage at the time to write it. Hugh S. Fullerton, then 46-years old and considered among the leading baseball writers of his era, wrote the story that Lardner, given his cynicism, and Grantland Rice, in the sweetness of his nature and style, would not and could not write. “The fake world series of 1919 produced some of the worst newspaper reporting that the American press ever has been guilty of, and while all of us who were detailed to cover the show were not fired for missing the greatest sport story in 20 years is something that I have never understood. We were terrible,” wrote columnist Westbrook Pegler from the more convenient perspective of 1932. Yet today, we celebrate Lardner, revere Rice and barely remember Fullerton, who may have been more respected than either in their day.