A Multi-faceted Approach to Collaborative Health Information Systems

Modern healthcare is confronted with increasing costs and complexity, progressive population ageing and pandemics triggered by new disease strains and population displacements fuelled by conflicts and climate change. In this context, effective cooperation and interoperability of the participants and their information systems in the healthcare effort becomes paramount. This brings about significant challenges, as healthcare institutions are typically hierarchical and heterogeneous owing to a complex administrative, geographical and historical context. At the same time, governments find it increasingly difficult to rely on ‘silo’ type information and organisational paradigms in order to manage population wellbeing. Thus, there is an increasing need for innovative, holistic and integrated models that take into account all essential aspects, elements and especially life cycles of all the healthcare effort participants. Building on previous research and applications, this paper proposes that the required modelling artefacts can be built using a life cycle-based holistic paradigm enabled by advances in Information Systems, Interoperability, Collaborative Networks and Enterprise Architecture. This multi-faceted approach holds the promise to a sound platform for sustainable solutions to both long and short-term challenges to population health and well-being

Improving Digital Decision Making Through Situational Awareness

Technical advances in Information and Communication Technology have enabled the collection and storage of large amounts of data, rising hopes of digitalising and thus potentially improving decision making and related support systems. Unfortunately however, the pre-existing gap between required decision making knowledge and the useful information provided by current technologies appears to increase rather than contract. Thus, the multitude of patterns presently provided by current data analytics techniques do not deliver an adequate set of scenarios to enable effective decision making by humans. This paper advocates a digital decision analytics solution featuring the use of Situated Logic to create ‘narratives’ describing the meaning of data analytics results and the use of Channel Theory in order to support adequate situational awareness. This approach is explained in the context of a System-of-Systems paradigm highly relevant to today’s typically complex clusters of distributed collaborative decision making centres and their associated decision support systems

New service development (NSD) process in the collaborative networks context : a study of NSD performance factors across its different stage

Tese de Doutoramanto. Engenharia Industrial e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Um Arcabouço de suporte à tomada de decisão colaborativa para o gerenciamento da evolução de empresas virtuais

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica, Florianópolis, 2010Durante a fase de operação de uma empresa virtual (EV), diferentes tipos de problemas costumam ocorrer, e precisam ser tratados adequadamente de forma a garantir que os objetivos da EV sejam alcançados. Entretanto, EVs possuem certas características intrínsecas que fazem com que as tomadas de decisão tenham que respeitar uma série de requisitos. Dentre outros, que estas sejam efetivadas de maneira colaborativa, descentralizada, distribuída e transparente, considerando a autonomia, independência e dispersão geográfica dos membros participantes. Além da agilidade, a qualidade e a confiança na decisão são fatores extremamente importantes. Dentro desse cenário, o processo de tomada de decisão acaba por ser complexo. Como forma de contribuir para diminuir esta complexidade, este trabalho propõe um inédito arcabouço integrado de tomada de decisão colaborativa, que assista os gestores ao longo de todo o processo decisório, incluindo a possibilidade de se avaliar a exequibilidade e o impacto da decisão em cada membro, para cada EV nas quais estão envolvidos. Um dos mais importantes elementos do arcabouço é o protocolo de tomada de decisão. Ele é o mecanismo que coordena a resolução do problema, coordenação esta amparada numa adaptação do modelo ECM (Engineering Change Management) de gestão ágil e de mudanças de projetos e que visa guiar os gestores em direção a soluções mais efetivas. Métodos de avaliação de desempenho provêm uma avaliação do impacto da decisão a ser tomada. Um protótipo computacional foi implementado para avaliação da proposta, sendo testado, verificado e avaliado em um ambiente controlado. A implementação garante flexibilidade e adaptabilidade do protocolo de decisão a diferentes EVs e ACVs (Ambiente de Criação de Empresas Virtuais / VBE - Virtual Organization Breeding Environment), utilizando as tecnologias baseadas em BPM (Business Process Management) e SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) como suporte. O arcabouço desenvolvido assume fundamentalmente que as empresas parceiras de uma EV são todas membros de um ACV. Isso, basicamente, pressupõe a existência de importantes aspectos, como um grau bastante razoável de confiança entre os parceiros, de níveis razoáveis de infraestrutura computacional, de compartilhamento de visão organização (trabalho em rede e colaborativo) e de acordo em termos de procedimentos operacionais a serem seguidos quando de problemas, e de treinamento adequado dos gestores das empresas sobre gestão de EVs. O arcabouço desenvolvido foi concebido, implementado e avaliado considerando as características de EVs, e não de outros tipos de alianças estratégicas / redes colaborativas, e foi avaliado para fase de evolução de EVs.Different sort of problems use to take place during the virtual enterprises (VE) operation phase and they must be properly handled in order to guarantee the achievement of VE goals. However, VEs have some intrinsic characteristics which impose respecting a number of requirements in decision making. Among others, that decision making are performed in a collaborative, decentralized, distributed and transparent way, considering that VE members are autonomous, independent and geographically dispersed. Besides agility, quality and trust in decisions are also extremely important. In this scenario, decision making becomes complex. This work proposes a novel approach as a contribution to solve this problem. It is represented by an integrated collaborative decision making framework that assist VE managers along the entire decision making process, including the possibility of evaluating decision feasibility and its impact over the VE, for each VE that members are involved in. One of the most important framework elements is the decision protocol. It corresponds to the mechanism that coordinates the problem solving and that is based on an adaptation of ECM (Engineering Change Management) model for agile and change management. This protocol has the aim of guiding decision-makers towards more effective solutions. Performance evaluation methods provide means for impact analysis. A software prototype was implemented to evaluate the framework, being tested in an open but controlled environment. The implementation copes with the required flexibility and adaptability of the decision protocol to different VEs and VBEs (Virtual Organization Breeding Environment), and it applies BPM (Business Process Management) e SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) technologies as a support for. The developed framework fundamentally assumes that VE partners are all members of a VBE. This fact hence presupposes the presence of important aspects, such as of a reasonable degree of trust among members, of an adequate computing infrastructure, of common organization vision (in terms of collaboration and enterprise networking) and operational procedures to be followed when problems take place, and that VE managers are trained for that. The framework was devised, implemented and evaluated for the VE case, and not for other types of strategic alliances / collaborative networks, and it focused on the evolution phase within the VE life cycle