Effekter av e-tjänster inom den offentliga vården : En kvalitativ fallstudie om hur e-tjänster kan påverka en offentlig vårdorganisations verksamhet och dess medarbetare

Sammanfattning: E-services are becoming increasingly prevalent in various contexts. Organizations in the public sector have also embraced this trend and today provide e-services with different purposes, e.g. various e-health services. Although there are advantages of e-services compared to traditional channels, they are not free of problems; a public organization must, among other things, provide an availability that private organizations may not need. This in turn means that the business needs to adapt its internal IT systems to handle incoming cases, which affects both the organization’s business and its employees. As today’s demands exceeds the resources, and that the population in Sweden is growing older, demands increase on the health care’s business. Citizens have to take greater responsibility for their own healthcare, which involves changes in working methods through effective e-services. Therefore, we examined the consequences this has within the business, as well as how the use of e-services affects the employees’ working routines and administrative work. The study aims to identify and analyze consequences, opportunities and obstacles with e-health and e-services within a public health care organization. In this way, we see that the study may help with possible explanations to the challenges that arise from the use of e-services in the public health care. The intention is also to identify and describe possible gaps between expected effects of strategies and the outcome in the operational business, which we see can contribute to greater understanding of the differences and how they might be handled. The study is based on a qualitative case study on Region Östergötland, where we have collected empirical data through interviews. The interviews have then been interpreted and analyzed to provide an illustration of how the organization strategically works with e-services in the public healthcare and how this is manifested in the business. The study results and conclusions show that there are both positive and less desirable effects of e-services within the operational level of the business. The same also applies to certain strategic decisions, particularly the decision to make patient records available through the e-service My health care contacts. We consider that an important contribution of the study is to highlight the needs from the operational health care business, as well as the importance of taking these into account in the development of e-health and e-service related strategies. We consider that another contribution of the study is the need to reflect on the business implications that may arise as a result of e-services.