Fifteen Challenges in Establishing a Multidisciplinary Research Program on eHealth Research in a University Setting: A Case Study

Abstract

BackgroundU-CARE is a multidisciplinary eHealth research program that involves the disciplines of caring science, clinical psychology, health economics, information systems, and medical science. It was set up from scratch in a university setting in 2010, funded by a governmental initiative. While establishing the research program, many challenges were faced. Systematic documentation of experiences from establishing new research environments is scarce.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper was to describe the challenges of establishing a publicly funded multidisciplinary eHealth research environment.MethodsResearchers involved in developing the research program U-CARE identified challenges in the formal documentation and by reflecting on their experience of developing the program. The authors discussed the content and organization of challenges into themes until consensus was reached.ResultsThe authors identified 15 major challenges, some general to establishing a new research environment and some specific for multidisciplinary eHealth programs. The challenges were organized into 6 themes: Organization, Communication, Implementation, Legislation, Software development, and Multidisciplinarity.ConclusionsSeveral challenges were faced during the development of the program and several accomplishments were made. By sharing our experience, we hope to help other research groups embarking on a similar journey to be prepared for some of the challenges they are likely to face on their way.

A critical realist synthesis of cross-disciplinary health policy and systems research: defining characteristic features, developing an evaluation framework and identifying challenges

“…Overall, the Fig. 2 Framework of the context-mechanism-outcome onfiguration in cross-disciplinary health policy and systems research literature identified cross-disciplinarity as a distinctive approach whose context, including the scope of the research problem [20-22, 24, 52, 54, 64, 65], purpose of investigation [13,14,23,53,55,56,[66][67][68][69] and study setting [13,24,55,60,66,67,[70][71][72] differ from monodisciplinary approaches. We found that these context-dependent characteristics proceed to define the mechanisms and outcomes of cross-disciplinarity [13, 20-23, 52-57, 59, 60, 64, 67, 70, 73, 74].…”

“…However, depending on the degree of cross-disciplinary integration, the research questions may differ across the involved disciplines (multidisciplinary health policy and systems research (MDHPSR)), may be shared between disciplines or have been mutually agreed upon (interdisciplinary health policy and systems research (IDHPSR) and transdisciplinary health policy and systems research (TDHPSR)). Some of the articles argue that combinations of findings from different monodisciplinary studies about a common health problem, which were not conducted in a predetermined •Co-design, co-investigation and cocreation limited to participating disciplines [22,57,74] •Philosophy of transient and intermittent conceptual, theoretical and methodological integration [55,75] •Focuses on explicit exchange of perspectives, concepts and methods [68,74], reciprocal discipline-specific action [54,60] •Integration traverse stakeholder, disciplinary, organisational and professional boundaries [20,53,59,67] •Formative scientific team [20,52,77] •Co-design, co-investigation and co-creation over disciplinary limits [20,52,67,74] •Philosophy of flexibility and ongoing integration in response to new information about the problem [20,28,74] •Reflects robust systematic interplay between research stakeholders (academic and nonacademic) and elements (design, data collection and analysis) of the research [20,76,78] Outcome •More basic than action-oriented output [13,75,79] •Output is the sum of individual evaluations [21,23,70] •Diverse perspectives to the topic being studied [13,21,…”

“…Justification of a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem [23,54,55,69,70,76] Is there a clear description of how cross-disciplinarity provides a more useful approach to addressing the problem than the alternatives?…”

“…Conflict resolution1. Identification and response to researchers' own conflicts [19,23,24,58,59,67,68,70] Are the possible/practical disciplinary and personal conflicts among researchers stated and addressed?…”

A Framework for Applying Educational Psychology Principles to the Design and Assessment of Learning Technology

“…Multidisciplinary collaboration, usually as a result of effective communication from experts of different career backgrounds, has reached to solve complex problems and create innovative products [46]. However, in a multidisciplinary environment, professionals may lack a basic common ground to communicate effectively (shared vocabulary and/or theoretical background), making it difficult to get a fully productive team [18]. Furthermore, understanding multidisciplinary domains allows to enable "productive and meaningful communication", and it is especially important when developing software, since a great effort is invested during requirements elicitation [25].…”