Workflow Management for Multiple Sclerosis Patients: IT and Organization

Patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) visit various healthcare providers during the course of their disease. It was suggested that IT might help to\ud orchestrate their care provision. We have applied the USE IT-tool to get insight in the relevant problems, solutions and constraints of the MS-care and the MS care providers both in the organizational and the information technological area. There is hardly a chain of healthcare, but rather, a network in which informal communication plays an important role. This informal network worked reasonably effective, but inefficient and slow. The patient himself plays a keyrole in information exchange between care-providers. Many providers were unaware of the services that other healthcare providers could give in general or did provide to a specific patient. MS patients-count is only small for most care providers. None of the interviewed patients mentioned a lack of contacts between careproviders as a problem. They thought that lack of\ud experience caused their major problems: insufficient and inadequate care. To improve care, we proposed a solution that combines a “short MS-protocol”, the\ud introduction of a central coordinator of care and a Patient Relation Management (PRM) System. This is a simple web-based application that is based on agreement by the caregivers that supports routing, tracking and tracing of a MS patient and supplies the caregivers with professional guidelines, as written down in the protocol. It is likely that we would have suggested a far more complicated ICT solution if we had only analyzed the MS-care process as such, without specific consideration of the USE IT dimensions

Towards a better understanding of the e-health user: comparing USE IT and Requirements study for an Electronic Patient Record.

This paper compares a traditional requirements study with 22 interviews for the design of an electronic patient record (EPR) and a USE IT analysis with 17 interviews trying to understand the end- user of an EPR. Developing, implementing and using information technology in organizations is a complex social activity. It is often characterized by ill-defined problems or vague goals, conflicts and disruptions that result from organizational change. Successfully implementing information systems in healthcare organizations appears to be a difficult task. Information Technology is regarded as an enabler of change in healthcare organizations but (information) technology adoption decisions in healthcare are complex, because of the uncertainty of benefits and the rate of change of technology. (Job) Relevance is recognized as an important determinant for IS success but still does not find its way into a systems design process