What Renders Dental Informatics Specific?

Abstract

“Micro, mini, megamini — minisuper, gigapico and so on — gateways, fiber, LAN and WANT-knowledge bases, robotvision, PACS — Email, fax and teletex — laservision, CD-ROM and videotext. Forget the books and folders, throw away your pencils, staplers, clips, erasers. Avoid the human ways of working and of thinking, ‘human factors’ are too dangerous. Hyperknowledge, expert systems, robots make life easy and yet better, more productive, stimulating, innovative.” That is the song of the computer sirens. An ever increasing number of hesitants are starting the hazardous journey towards the enticing sea-nymphs dwelling on the islands of the electronic digital world. Sayings such as: “the transition to the computer era is sooner or later a must, better go through it right away than before it is too late” or: “my colleagues have it, I must have it too” are typical. There is, in other words, a solution, one has just to find the appropriate problems. In case there are no such problems one has to change both the work and organizational contexts in such a way that appropriate problems arise. Because this way of change does not intrinsically relate to or come from the needs and possibilities for improving actual procedures and organization at a specific work place, experienced actors at the work place cannot themselves invent and design this change. Instead this is made by informatics consultants who in the best case have some prior knowledge of the activities they are going to change.