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

Abstract

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.