Our colleague Jasmina Mašović defended her dissertation “The relational view of the impact of new technologies on medical work: The case of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI)” on 9 April 2024 and was awarded a Ph.D. degree at The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Oslo.  
The decision-making processes to implement new technologies in healthcare involve negotiation and collaboration among various stakeholders, including medical professionals, their communities, hospitals, governments and Ministries, as well as medical technology producers. These processes also require developing new medical expertise and procedures, clinical findings, organizational infrastructures, and legal frameworks. Therefore, understanding the integration of new technologies into healthcare necessitates a relational and processual perspective. The thesis advocates for a practice-based research approach and a "comprehensive" application of the relational view in studying the implementation of new technologies and procedures in healthcare.

The research findings demonstrate how technologies can both disrupt and maintain medical jurisdictions and disciplinary boundaries in hospitals, leading to complex structural reorganizations. In a dynamic and controversial environment, diverse actors interactively shape new medical practices, and procedures often evolve in a non-sequential temporal order. The dissertation also highlights how a relational perspective can help address the slow pace of modernizing work and organization in healthcare.

This doctoral thesis was based on a five-year multiple case study of implementing a new medical procedure across nine hospitals in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The research was funded by the VERDIKT program of the Norwegian Research Council and has been a cross-institutional project between the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, the Department of Innovation and Economic Organization at BI Norwegian Business School and the Intervention Centre of the University Hospital Oslo.