A Guideline to Use Activity Theory for Collaborative Healthcare Information Systems Design

In healthcare, collaborative systems serve very different stakeholders: researchers, clinicians, nurses, patients, and administrators for instance. In order to design a collaborative healthcare information system that satisfies the stakeholders' needs, all individual requirements have to be mapped into the software. Traditional system design focuses at technical features and oftentimes ignores social requirements like human factors or organizational structures. Instead of integrating existing processes and working habits into a system, a technical-focused design approach tries to force new behaviors. As a result, stakeholders could refuse to use collaborative healthcare information systems. In line with Kuutti (1991), we recommend activity theory as a rich framework to study and design collaborative information systems. We believe that activity theory analysis is particularly useful for healthcare settings where diverse stakeholders pursue very different goals. This book chapter offers a structured approach to analyze collaborative activities and to design the IT-support accordingly.

Optimization in collaborative information systems for an enhanced interoperability network

Today's constraints on collaborative enterprises are often directly reflected in the interoperability of their information systems. The goal is to improve and effectively evolve the global interoperability of collaboration by distributing the required effort in an optimal way on different information systems to achieve the target goal. This method of enhancement will be realized by applying an IMA (Interoperability Measurement Approach) to generate a ratio representing the degree of interoperability of an information system within the collaboration, as well as applying the heuristic optimization method PPSO (Paralleled Particle Swarm Optimization) to reach the optimal distribution of effort.

A Guideline to Use Activity Theory for Collaborative Healthcare Information Systems Design

In healthcare, collaborative systems serve very different stakeholders: researchers, clinicians, nurses, patients, and administrators for instance. In order to design a collaborative healthcare information system that satisfies the stakeholders' needs, all individual requirements have to be mapped into the software. Traditional system design focuses at technical features and oftentimes ignores social requirements like human factors or organizational structures. Instead of integrating existing processes and working habits into a system, a technical-focused design approach tries to force new behaviors. As a result, stakeholders could refuse to use collaborative healthcare information systems. In line with Kuutti (1991), we recommend activity theory as a rich framework to study and design collaborative information systems. We believe that activity theory analysis is particularly useful for healthcare settings where diverse stakeholders pursue very different goals. This book chapter offers a structured approach to analyze collaborative activities and to design the IT-support accordingly.