RESUMEN
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in huge disruption to the healthcare sector. In response to this, there have been collaborative efforts between many different public and private organizations to foster medical innovations. The effect of crisis upon innovation, particularly medical innovation, remains a debatable subject. In addition, the role of inter-personal relations is becoming more widely acknowledged as a critical feature of innovation. Drawing upon exaptation literature, the study aims to understand the nature of the micro-relations within medical innovations that are undertaken in response to COVID-19. The findings of this paper contribute to the limited literature that examines the performance of medical innovation in response to crisis. In addition to confirming the importance of exaptive pools, exaptive events, and exaptive forums in fostering serendipitous developments, the study makes a contribution to theory by identifying a further form of serendipitous encounter that is 'exaptive relations'.
RESUMEN
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly augmented the urgency for service providers to identify and develop clinically urgent system alterations into healthcare systems to facilitate antibody testing and treatment interventions. However, it has been difficult to determine how users assess the value of an information system in terms of its functionality and features. Conversely, the system development process to address urgent user requirements, for example, developing new functionality for COVID antibody testing, has been beset by a myriad of difficulties as research to understand the value of specific aspects of clinical information systems has been elusive. This study addresses this knowledge gap by identifying specific aspects of a national clinical information system in Wales, UK. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, a quantitative study of 559 clinical users and a focus group, the study deconstructs system-related value into 14 unique attributes that have been found to vary according to different types of user roles and geographic location. Attribution theory is identified in this study as a novel and effective way to study this multifaceted concept of system value. The identification of component attributes of the value of a clinical information system provides insights for service users, system developers, and organization managers to prioritize and focus their system development activity by using an importance ranking identified through this study.