A discourse analysis of medical solution: Telemedicine idea translation

Abstract

Telemedicine is not confined to patient care but provides solutions to the challenges and issues that our society is facing. However, the phenomenon of telemedicine and its translation vary because of differences in rules and regulations, multifaceted networks, and initiatives taken by actors considering time and space. Through answering our research question ‘How telemedicine has been translated in EU, Sweden, and some hospitals in Gothenburg City’, we depicted the original picture which the previous thesis could not do. We use mixers of theories from change management in organizational studies, translation, and CoP because all of those are crucial for understanding how the idea gets into practice in a coherent way. We utilized discourse analysis (which uses written or oral texts to understand features and meanings) to study plenty of literature that help us get a very resourceful thought on the EU and Sweden along with two very fruitful interviews to get the latest thinking about telemedicine idea in Gothenburg. We found the EU, as a governing body, considers telemedicine in all of its 34 countries and therefore, the telemedicine idea covers common areas of this region with the external network in thought and versatile translation to make it practice. While Sweden has regional reflections from government bodies to a countrywide network including international aspects in telemedicine practice, some hospitals in Gothenburg region are individualistic with a countrywide inspection. In translation of idea, the same idea can be read in different ways and change should be a continuous (not planned) process with idea formation in an unknown object or modification of the known object. Then the idea that travels in time and space materializes through a network of the project and the resultant idea is institutionalized by various rules, regulations, policies, and guidelines, etc. The translated idea becomes a practice in CoP, social constellations, but the time and space effect and the management approach have significant aftermath in practice. Finally, through our query on how telemedicine has been translated, we showed the meaningful way to understand a phenomenon and its practice that enrich both theoretical works by showing uses of those in combination and in practice by focusing on the complexities.