Using Dissemination and Implementation Strategies to Evaluate Requirement Elicitation Guidelines: A Case Study in a Bed Management System

Abstract

Clinical software is a fundamental tool for supporting healthcare systems because it improves the quality of patient care and automatizes the most frequently performed clinical tasks. Nevertheless, since health systems include various components, such as supplies, transportation, laboratories, and interoperability, eliciting the most critical requirements for understanding the problem that the clinical software must solve is quite a complex task. Indeed, the requirement elicitation process may directly determine the success or failure of the clinical software. In this article, we present the D&I framework, a methodology that uses dissemination and implementation strategies to recommend guidelines for the elicitation of clinical software requirements. The objective of this framework is to support software developers in the identification of key requirements with the goal of more holistically understanding the problem to be solved by the clinical software. We evaluated the D&I framework with a real case study related to a bed management system. We employed a usability instrument with 50 clinicians to evaluate tasks in software modules that represent clinical priorities defined by stakeholders. The results indicate that the perception of usability by end users is acceptable, suggesting that the evaluated tasks satisfy the established clinical priorities. The D&I framework provides a starting point for research and discussion about the contribution of dissemination and implementation strategies to the body of knowledge about requirement engineering.

Evaluating Dissemination and Implementation Strategies to Develop Clinical Software

“…• Use ontologies and semantics to verify requirements specification (Id=6) These suggestions are based on a catalog described in [5], which maps implementation and dissemination strategies towards requirements elicitation techniques. Finally, the development team must select the appropriate guidelines for requirements elicitation and then proceed with the corresponding analysis and documentation.…”

“…The D&I Framework is a technique that suggests guidelines to elicit requirements in order to contextualize the clinical problem that the software must address (see Figure 1) [5]. The D&I Framework combines requirement elicitation techniques and clinical intervention-based implementation and dissemination strategies [6] to support software development teams in implementing clinical software.…”

“…The objective of this stage is to select the implementation or dissemination strategies (more details on the strategies can be found in [5]). This stage involves the same stakeholders as in the previous stage.…”

“…To support clinical software developers, we have proposed the D&I Framework [5]. This collaborative technique identifies and characterizes clinical priorities that should be implemented in the software.…”

“…In our previous work [5], we investigated implementation and dissemination sciences [6] as an alternative to support clinical software developers to address the problem mentioned above. Dissemination and implementation sciences use knowledge from evidence-based research to reduce barriers in order to deliver innovation and technology adoption in health care settings.…”