How to co-develop services, work, and information systems in healthcare: the daisy approach.

Information systems in healthcare need to be designed and developed in a collaborative way. However, existing collaborative methodologies for the parallel development of healthcare work and information systems are vague and fragmented. Furthermore, they neither address people-centred healthcare nor limited-resource contexts. In this paper we introduce an emerging holistic approach, based on a unifying theoretical basis, for co-developing the services, work and information systems in healthcare. The approach intends to (a) be collaborative in nature; (b) address the domains of both healthcare professionals and ordinary people / communities; (c) span the main analysis and design tasks of socio-technical information systems development from needs assessment through requirements setting to functional-architectural solutions; (d) be contextually sensitive; and (e) be practicable in "real life" beyond research settings.

Four-level process modeling in healthcare SOA analysis and design.

Process and activity modeling are widely used in healthcare work and systems development projects. There are various approaches and abstractions available for process modeling. This study describes a four-level approach to activity and process modeling which has been used in modeling healthcare activities in relation to the specification of service-oriented information systems solutions. Based on the material and experience from these efforts: 1) overview level descriptions are well capable of illustrating the domain of the development, 2) many current notations and techniques on process level fail to describe diverse practices in healthcare, 3) descriptions on activity level should be generalized and combined in novel ways to achieve reuse and to support complex domains, 4) very accurate and detailed action-level modeling should be used cautiously to reduce unnecessary workload and to focus on the essential features of the solutions.

Integration models in health information systems: experiences from the PlugIT project.

Different approaches are available for the integration of existing health information systems (HIS) in integration projects. Within the PlugIT project in Finland, we have found it necessary to design and implement integration in a collaborative, multidisciplinary and open way. In this paper, we use some generic integration models and relate them to the methods, solutions and experiences of the project. We summarize the results from nine integration teams, methods development and supporting surveys and studies, and discuss these experiences to provide some guidelines for the HIS integration projects in general.

Gathering, structuring and describing information needs in home care: a method for requirements exploration in a "gray area".

The aim of our research is to develop a method for "requirements exploration"--gathering, structuring and describing requirements for information systems in previously weakly understood areas. In health care, information systems are usually developed for a single organization, or for information flow from one organization to another. In our case domain, multi-professional and multi-organizational home care, this approach is not very helpful. Moreover, home care takes place in "no-man's-land"; outside the organizations' infrastructure, in the customer's home, and technology is used scarcely. In this paper, we describe how information requirements were explored in this scantly understood domain by using an activity-theoretical approach. We also explain how this approach served our purposes. The method proved useful in grasping the network of activities and the information needs. The holistic nature of the method was particularly important, since technology is not the only solution to the needs we discovered.