Cognitive Work Analysis to support development of health IT in a complex organization

• The continuous development of health IT fuels a process of ongoing digitalization that can affect the work of hospital staff negatively with respect to the poor integration of IT systems. One aim is to understand challenges associated with the work of implementing health IT systems within a complex organization. Another aim is to explore how an abstraction hierarchy, a modeling tool from the cognitive work analysis framework, can be used for development of health IT by visualizing how IT systems’ functions overlap, interfere with or depend on each other. We interviewed decision makers holding different positions at a large university hospital in Sweden and the possible use of the abstraction hierarchy was evaluated during a workshop. Multiple challenges are associated with the development of health IT systems, including difficulties in usability work, various work roles and use cases, the complexity of the organization, external development and technical and legal barriers to system integration. The abstraction hierarchy could indicate the need for further investigation of functionality overlap and reveal collaboration needs between development projects.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Människa-datorinteraktion (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Human Computer Interaction (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Digitalization

Cognitive Work Analysis

Work Domain Analysis

Abstraction Hierarchy

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)