Research - Digitized Medicine

I have been researching the ways in which technology is affecting the field of medicine, particularly in the fields of surgery and radiology.  Currently, hospitals and medical offices are digitizing all of their patients’ medical records, and attempting to function in a paperless space. The manila file stuffed with incoherent scribbles of past visit, medication, and test results is being replaced by multimedia documents that may include advanced digital imagery of the patient. In addition, medical technologies are changing the role of the physician to one of a computer technician – magnetic resonance imaging, laparoscopic exploration, automated cellular imaging systems, and 3D optical scanning are a few examples of technologies in which doctors rely on digital technologies to provide patients with a diagnosis. 

How might this affect the patient’s expectations of his physician? Does digitization of medical records inevitably lead to centralization? If we assume that digitization is inevitable, can patients capitalize on their own documents? Who or what can patients and physicians expect to have access to their records? How will our digital self live on after our physical body doesn’t? What are doctors looking for when they switch to digital record-keeping and will they find it? Why do doctors wear stethoscopes …

My dissertation, Green Chairs, Fictional Phalluses, Infiltration, and Love on the Rocks: Medical Imaging Artifacts Blown Up, outlines and applies a methodology for deciphering problems and producing new information by analyzing the artifacts produced by medical imaging technologies – text and images – using practices gleaned from Surrealists, semiologists, and visual artists, emphasizing its own form as being the product of the apparatuses that produce it and therefore untrustworthy. Its basic assumption is that every text contains the information necessary to solve problems of all sorts, though because of the limitations of this text in both form and authorial intellect, we may only reach a starting point for a solution herein. In this regard, we are deciphering rather than solving. Further, this text illustrates primarily through narratives how digital imaging technologies mediate our relationship with our doctors, illnesses, and our bodies. It explores how the artifacts produced by medical imaging technologies create a data stream that replaces the corporal patient, shifting the physician’s focus from the whole body to pieces and parts.

It is a study of texts and technologies. The method evolved from a rhetorical approach to examining the medical imaging artifacts and the processes by which those artifacts come into existence, with the method and form becoming part of the story, producing a wide array of new information that transcends disciplinary constraints.

Visual and Textual Productions

Here are a few visual and textual expressions of my research:

Contact Me

If you have medical expertise or insight on this topic and would like to discuss this research, please email me by clicking here: Lynn Koller.