Abstract
This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of ‘practical ethical action’ in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid’s potential for sharing data within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science in general. Future e-Health and e-Science systems will need to be compatible with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are realised and embedded within work practices.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson R. (1994). Representations and requirements: The value of ethnography in systems design. Human-Computer Interaction 9: 151–182
Ashcroft, R. (2003): Making Sense of the Guidelines on Sharing Personal Data. Presentation at Workshop on Ethical Issues in e-Science. All Hands Meeting 2003, Nottingham.
Berg M., Goorman E. (1999). The contextual nature of medical information. International Journal of Medical Informatics 56(1–3):51–60
Brady, M. and R. Highnam (1999): Mammographic Image Analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Boseley, S. (2004): Breast Cancer; The Relentless Rise. January 15th, The Guardian.
Caldas A. (2003). Are newsgroups extending “invisible colleges" into the digital infrastructure of science?. Economics of Innovation and New Technology 12 (1): 43–60
Cicourel A. (1990). The Integration of Distributed Knowledge in Collaborative Medical Diagnosis. In: Galegher J., Kraut R. and Egido C. (eds) Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey
Coopmans, C. (forthcoming): Making Mammograms Mobile: Suggestions for a Sociology of Data Mobility. Information, Communication and Society
Crane D. (1972). Invisible Colleges. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Dweck, R. (2003): Sifting Through Standards. March 10th, Bio IT World.
Foster, I. and C. Kesselman (eds.) (2004): The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Garfinkel H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey
Geldman, A. (2002): NHS Staff: The Issue Explained. June 26th, The Guardian, http://society.guardian.co.uk/NHSstaff/story/0,7991,460023,00.html
Giorgini, P., F. Massacci, J. Mylopoulos and N. Zannone (2004): Requirements Engineering Meets Trust Management: Model, Methodology, and Reasoning. Technical Report DIT-04–016, Informatica e Telecomunicazioni, University of Trento.
Goodwin C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96: 606–33
Hartswood, M. and R. Procter (2000): Designing for Breakdowns and Repairs in Collaborative Work Settings. In B. Fields and P. Wright (eds.): Special Issue on Understanding Work and Designing Artefacts, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 91–120.
Hartswood M., Procter R., Rouncefield M., Slack R. (2002). Performance Management in Breast Screening: A Case Study of Professional Vision and Ecologies of Practice. Journal of Cognition, Technology and Work 4(2): 91–102
Hartswood, M., R. Procter, M. Rouncefield and R. Slack (2003a): Cultures of Reading in Mammography. In D. Francis and S. Hester (eds.): Orders of Ordinary Action: Respecifying Sociological Knowledge. Ashgute Publishing, Aldershot.
Hartswood, M., R. Procter, M. Rouncefield, R. Slack and J. Soutter (2003b): The Work of Reading Mammograms and the Implications for Computer-Aided Detection Systems. In Proceedings of the Seventh Medical Image Understanding and Analysis Conference. Sheffield, July, British Machine Vision Association, pp. 89–92.
Hartswood M., Jirotka M., Procter R., Slack R., Voss A., Lloyd S. (2005). Working IT out in e-Science: Experiences of requirements capture in HealthGrid projects. In: Solomnides T , McClatchey R., Breton V., Legre Y., Nørager S. (eds) Proceedings of HealthGrid 2005. From Grid to Healthgrid. IOS Press, Amsterdam
Heath, C.C. and P. Luff (1996): Documents and Professional Practice: ‘Bad’ Organisational Reasons For ‘Good’ Clinical Records. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Co-Operative Work. November, Boston: ACM Press.
Heath C.C., Luff P., Sanchez Svensson M. (2003). Technology and Medical Practices. Sociology of Health and Illness 25(3): 73–96
Hinds, C. and C. Coopmans (2003): Screening Requirements (1) eDiaMoND. Technical Report.
Hine, C. (ed.). New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding e-Science. Idea Group, Hershey, PA (forthcoming)
Hughes, J., V. King, T. Rodden and H. Andersen (1994): Moving out From the Control Room: Ethnography in System Design. In Proceedings of CSCW’94. Chapel Hill, NC: ACM Press.
Jirotka, M. (2003). Screening Evaluation Report. eDiaMoND Technical Report.
Jones, S., M. Wilikens, P. Morris and M. Masera (2000): Trust Requirements in e-Business. Communications of the ACM, vol. 43, no. 12, pp. 81–87.
Luhmann, N. (2000): Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. In D. Gambetta (ed.): Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations. Electronic edition, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Chapter 6, pp. 94–107. http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/luhmann94–107.pdf
Moreau, L. S. Miles, C. A. Goble, M. Greenwood, V. Dialini, M. Addis, N. Alpdemir, R.␣Cawley, O. De Roure, J. Ferris, R. Gaizauskas, K. Glover, C. Greenhalgh, P. Li, X. Liu, P.␣Lord, V. Radenkovich, A. Roberts, A. Robinson, T. Rodden, M. Senger, N. Sharman, R.␣Stevens, B. Warboys, P. Watson, and C. Wroe (2003): On the Use of Agents in a BioInformatic Grid. In S. Lee, S. Sekuchi, S. Matsuoka and M. Sato (eds.): Proceedings of the Third IEEE/ACM Workshop on Agent Based Cluster and Grid Computing. Tokyo, Japan, pp.␣653–661
Price D.J. de Solla (1963). Little Science, Big Science. Columbia University Press, Ithaca, NY
Power, D., E. Politou, M. Slaymaker, S. Harris and Simpson, A. (2004): A Relational Approach to the Capture of DICOM Files for Grid-enabled Medical Imaging Databases. To appear in ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Special track on Computer Applications in Healthcare.
Power, D., M. Slaymaker, E. Politou and A. Simpson (2005): A Secure Wrapper for OGSA-DAI. In Proceedings of the European Grid Conference, Amsterdam.
Rabinow, P. (1986): Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-modernity in Anthropology. In J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds.): Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sacks H. (1972). Notes on police assessment of moral character. In: Sudnow D. (eds) Studies in social interaction. Free Press, New York, pp. 280–93
Schneier, B. (2000): Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Shapin, S. (1994): A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Soutter, J., E. Anderson, J.C. Campos, M. Hartswood, L. Khoo, R. Procter, R. Slack, L. Smart, P. Taylor and L. Wilkinson (2003): The Role of Computer Based Training in Mammography. Royal College of Radiologists Breast Group Annual Scientific Meeting, November, Cardiff
Tabar, L. and P.B. Dean (2001): Teaching Atlas of Mammography. 3rd edn. Thieme Medical Publishers, ISBN 0865779627/3136408039.
Taylor, J. (2001): Presentation given at UK e-Science Meeting. July, London.
Tryfona T., Kiountouzis E., Poulymenakou A. (2001). Embedding security practices in contemporary information systems development approaches. Information Management and Computer Security 9: 183–197
Van House N. A. (2002). Digital libraries and practices of trust: networked biodiversity information. Social Epistemology 16(1): 99–114
Voss, A., R. Slack, R. Procter, R. Williams, M. Hartswood and M. Rouncefield (2002): Dependability as Ordinary Action. In S. Anderson, S. Bologna and M. Felici (eds.): Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (Safecomp), Catania, September 10–13th. Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 2434, Springer-Verlag GmBh, pp. 32–43.
Voss, A., R. Procter, R. Slack, M. Hartswood and M. Rouncefield (In press): Understanding and Supporting Dependability as Ordinary Action. In K. Clarke, G. Hardstone, M. Rouncefield and I. Sommerville (eds.): Trust in Technology: A Socio-Technical Systems Perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Zuccala, A. (2005): Modeling the Invisible College. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Maryland: Silver Spring.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
JIROTKA, M., PROCTER, R., HARTSWOOD, M. et al. Collaboration and Trust in Healthcare Innovation: The eDiaMoND Case Study. Comput Supported Coop Work 14, 369–398 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-005-9001-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-005-9001-0