Competing and Disruptive Objectives: Inefficient Communication Design in Medical Clinic and Healthcare Systems

The American system of delivering health treatment is highly expensive and extremely dysfunctional: in exploring solutions to our broken system of health treatment and healthcare delivery, we would do well to investigate how the dysfunctions arise within communication systems between clinics and insurance corporations. This study describes two situations, with notes gathered from observations and interviews of medical clinic staff, that exemplify the power struggles between competing systems and objectives and to show how the actors within the medical clinic systems work, often inefficiently and at great cost to the clinic, to advance the objectives of the clinic through the use of communicative tools, like claim and payment forms, letters of exception, and grievances to government offices. By investigating how these ineffective and inefficient tensions arise through genres used by the health insurance companies and medical clinics, this study suggests some solutions to establish more effective communication systems and, thus, less expensive overhead for medical clinics.