Exploring Healthcare Providers’ Workaround Practices to an M-Health Intervention

This study explores how healthcare providers in South African public hospitals enact workaround practices to an m-health intervention to overcome its limitations and constraints. Employing the work systems method, we analyze the causing factors driving the enactment of workaround practices to an m-health intervention in the Western Cape referral system, in South Africa. A total of 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with medical officers and IT personnel, to explore the rationales behind their enactment of workarounds. Despite the reported benefits such as improved mobility and communication between medical officers and specialists, the m-health intervention is currently not used as intended. Instead, health care providers (HCPs) are enacting workarounds to the current structures and subverting the m-health intervention due to design-reality gaps. While these design-reality gaps exist, these workarounds also offer opportunities for innovation and process improvements to the patient referral process in the public hospitals.