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There is an increasing demand for the rapid implementation of technologies that can address persisting and evolving needs of the health sector. However, to make technologies work in local health settings, a mutual alignment between technologies and local context is needed. Despite existing scholarship on health technology implementation, few have examined how human and non-human actors move towards technology implementation. Using the mobilities lens, we explore how healthcare providers negotiated the varied and conflicting movements of human and non-human entities in health technology implementation. We draw our findings from the experiences of Filipino primary care workers in implementing electronic medical records (EMR) in rural health units. We argue that conflicting speeds of mobilities make visible the workarounds employed by healthcare providers. These workarounds provide spaces for technology users to perform their routine practices and spaces for technologies to perform its work. Furthermore, we show how attention to mobility and speed reveals how preoccupation with fast-tracked, rapid intervention implementation may undermine the value of technologies in the practice of their intended beneficiaries. We conclude this article by discussing how a focus on mobility can further complicate the discussion on health technology implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By drawing perspectives from the multi-level perspectives in sociotechnical transition and the normalisation process theory, this article explores how ongoing (i.e., incomplete) national level reforms in health information management (HIM) shape the normalisation of electronic medical records (EMRs) in Philippine rural health work. Based on document review, interviews, and observations, we argue that an ongoing HIM regime transition—transitioning from paper-based to an electronic HIM regime—may exert ambivalent institutional pressures on health workers through their institutions' implementation context. The ambivalence of the implementation context—one that accommodates both EMR and paper-based medical records—offers conflicting social, cognitive, and material resources for normalising EMRs. In such a context, we find that health workers performed selective participation and partial implementation in normalising EMRs in their routine healthcare work. In selective participation, select health workers—often, the technologically savvy—could actively participate in the EMR implementation while others focused on their clinical work. At the same time, since only a few could use the EMR in routine work, EMRs were implemented partially in particular instances where it is deemed more valuable and applicable. We emphasised in this article how complementing the idea of normalisation with sociotechnical transition may reveal the emergence of pressures from various institutions and stakeholders that advances (or impede) the normalisation of healthcare innovations. • The implementation process involves regime transition and normalisation work. • Institutional pressures from regime transition shape the implementation context. • The Philippines has an ambivalent health information management (HIM) regime. • Techy health workers participated in electronic medical record (EMR) implementation. • EMRs were implemented partially in select areas within the rural health units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]