Reproducing social inequality and unequal treatment in the national health information infrastructure: A discourse analysis of IOM executive summaries.
This paper reports on preliminary data analysis for a larger research project whose purpose is to study how the discourse constituting the currently proposed NHII may reproduce existing social inequality in healthcare. The purpose of this preliminary study is to test the methods planned for the larger study. Textually oriented critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods have been used to compare three executive summaries, the first report of two recent series and one stand alone report from the Institute of Medicine: the Quality Chasm and the Insuring Health series, and the report Unequal Treatment. These methods proved to be an effective way to study the social action of language in use in the Institute of Medicine executive summaries and will be useful in studying a larger corpus of the discourse constituting the NHII. Further research along these lines will provide information required to prevent or mitigate the reproduction of social inequality in healthcare through the proposed NHII.
Trigg
Lisa J
LJ
School of Nursing, Biomedical & Health Informatics, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA. trigger@u.washington.edu
D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D007802:Language; D015969:National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, U.S., Health and Medicine Division; D012935:Social Justice; D014481:United States