Paper Type

Complete

Abstract

Hospital information systems (HIS) are intended to improve efficiency and enable seamless data exchange. Although technical standards exist, diverse socio-technical challenges disrupt clinicians’ daily work. Adopting the lens of workarounds—goal-directed deviations from prescribed routines enacted to sustain patient care—we derive (re-)design objectives for improving HIS. Employing the echeloned Design Science Research (eDSR) method and conducting 20 semi-structured interviews with clinicians from six German hospitals, we identify and analyze 17 workarounds and relate them to their underlying strategic, technical, and organizational misfits. Based on this problem analysis, we derive meta-requirements and (re-)design objectives to guide the improvement of HIS. The study contributes by outlining three (re-)design objectives for improving HIS—increase interoperability, reduce power asymmetries, and align HIS workflows with routines—and by demonstrating how workaround analysis can inform the derivation of design objectives.

Paper Number

1562

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Aug 15th, 12:00 AM

Improving Hospital Information Systems: Translating Workarounds into (Re-)Design Objectives

Hospital information systems (HIS) are intended to improve efficiency and enable seamless data exchange. Although technical standards exist, diverse socio-technical challenges disrupt clinicians’ daily work. Adopting the lens of workarounds—goal-directed deviations from prescribed routines enacted to sustain patient care—we derive (re-)design objectives for improving HIS. Employing the echeloned Design Science Research (eDSR) method and conducting 20 semi-structured interviews with clinicians from six German hospitals, we identify and analyze 17 workarounds and relate them to their underlying strategic, technical, and organizational misfits. Based on this problem analysis, we derive meta-requirements and (re-)design objectives to guide the improvement of HIS. The study contributes by outlining three (re-)design objectives for improving HIS—increase interoperability, reduce power asymmetries, and align HIS workflows with routines—and by demonstrating how workaround analysis can inform the derivation of design objectives.