Politics and technology in health information systems development: A discourse analysis of conflicts addressed in a systems design group

Managing multiple perspectives in the collaborative design process of a team health information technology

We need to design technologies that support the work of health care teams; designing such solutions should integrate different clinical roles. However, we know little about the actual collaboration that occurs in the design process for a team-based care solution. This study examines how multiple perspectives were managed in the design of a team health IT solution aimed at supporting clinician information needs during pediatric trauma care transitions. We focused our analysis on four co-design sessions that involved multiple clinicians caring for pediatric trauma patients. We analyzed design session transcripts using content analysis and process coding guided by Détienne's (2006) co-design framework. We expanded upon Détienne (2006) three collaborative activities to identify specific themes and processes of collaboration between care team members engaged in the design process. The themes and processes describe how team members collaborated in a team health IT design process that resulted in a highly usable technology.

User-centered requirements engineering in health information systems: a study in the hemophilia field

The use of sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the health care domain is a way to improve the quality of services. However, there are also hazards associated with the introduction of ICTs in this domain and a great number of projects have failed due to the lack of systematic consideration of human and other non-technology issues throughout the design or implementation process, particularly in the requirements engineering process. This paper presents the methodological approach followed in the design process of a web-based information system (WbIS) for managing the clinical information in hemophilia care, which integrates the values and practices of user-centered design (UCD) activities into the principles of software engineering, particularly in the phase of requirements engineering (RE). This process followed a paradigm that combines a grounded theory for data collection with an evolutionary design based on constant development and refinement of the generic domain model using three well-known methodological approaches: (a) object-oriented system analysis; (b) task analysis; and, (c) prototyping, in a triangulation work. This approach seems to be a good solution for the requirements engineering process in this particular case of the health care domain, since the inherent weaknesses of individual methods are reduced, and emergent requirements are easier to elicit. Moreover, the requirements triangulation matrix gives the opportunity to look across the results of all used methods and decide what requirements are critical for the system success.