A requirement engineering framework for assessing health care information systems

Health care is increasingly being provided by collaborative teams that involve multiple health care providers at multiple locations. To date, most of that collaboration is on an ad-hoc basis via phone calls, faxes, and paper based documentation. However, Internet and wireless technologies provide an opportunity to improve this situation via electronic data sharing. These new technologies make possible new ways of working and collaboration but it can be difficult for health care organizations to understand how to adopt new technologies while still ensuring that their policies and objectives are being met. It is also important to have a systematic approach to validate that e-health processes deliver the performance improvements that are expected. Using a case study of a palliative care patient receiving home care from a team of collaborating healthcare providers and organizations, we introduce a framework for assessing health care information systems based on requirements engineering. Key concerns and objectives were identified and modeled. Business processes which will use the new health care information system are modeled in terms of these concerns and objectives to assess their impact and ensure that electronic data sharing is well regulated and effective. The work in the thesis is design-oriented research to show the utility of our proposed requirement engineering framework compared to existing evaluation approaches for healthcare IT. The approach is evaluated based on a set of criteria drawn from our literature review and a gap analysis of our case study for palliative care.