A conceptual framework and protocol for defining clinical decision support objectives applicable to medical specialties.

BackgroundThe U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services established the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program in 2009 to stimulate the adoption of EHRs. One component of the program requires eligible providers to implement clinical decision support (CDS) interventions that can improve performance on one or more quality measures pre-selected for each specialty. Because the unique decision-making challenges and existing HIT capabilities vary widely across specialties, the development of meaningful objectives for CDS within such programs must be supported by deliberative analysis.DesignWe developed a conceptual framework and protocol that combines evidence review with expert opinion to elicit clinically meaningful objectives for CDS directly from specialists. The framework links objectives for CDS to specialty-specific performance gaps while ensuring that a workable set of CDS opportunities are available to providers to address each performance gap. Performance gaps may include those with well-established quality measures but also priorities identified by specialists based on their clinical experience. Moreover, objectives are not constrained to performance gaps with existing CDS technologies, but rather may include those for which CDS tools might reasonably be expected to be developed in the near term, for example, by the beginning of Stage 3 of the EHR Incentive program. The protocol uses a modified Delphi expert panel process to elicit and prioritize CDS meaningful use objectives. Experts first rate the importance of performance gaps, beginning with a candidate list generated through an environmental scan and supplemented through nominations by panelists. For the highest priority performance gaps, panelists then rate the extent to which existing or future CDS interventions, characterized jointly as "CDS opportunities," might impact each performance gap and the extent to which each CDS opportunity is compatible with specialists' clinical workflows. The protocol was tested by expert panels representing four clinical specialties: oncology, orthopedic surgery, interventional cardiology, and pediatrics

A process model for eliciting requirements of socio-technical systems

Designing Socio-Technical (ST) systems requires the designer to account for the intrinsic and interrelated characteristics of the tasks, actors, technologies, and environment. Requirements analysis informs the design of information systems. However, few approaches have emerged to analyze requirements for ST systems, which is considered complex, time consuming, and requires a large body of knowledge. In this paper we present a process model that aims to help identifying ST systems requirements. The process model assumes that ST systems characteristics of tasks, actors, technologies, and environment can help identifying a set of ST imbalances that in turn helps in the identification process of requirements. The applicability of the process model is demonstrated by identifying example requirements of self-care systems and results are presented

Grounding Functional Requirements Classification in Organizational Semiotics

An information system has its requirements rooted in organizational policies and behaviour, the complexity of which is governed by the hierarchy and the dependencies of the activities within the organization. This complexity makes requirements analysis for an envisioned information system an intricately challenging task. The absence of well‐defined body of knowledge clearly specifying which requirements must be looked for further deepens the challenge of requirements analysis. Though requirements are broadly classified as functional and non‐functional, a special concern is required for functional requirements as the information system is expected to meet the behaviour of the organization. We explore the role of organizational semiotics in extracting and analysing functional requirements for an envisioned information system. We also report the results of supervised learning to automatically extract the functional requirements from the existing available documentation

Classifying groupware tools to improve communication in geographically distributed elicitation

In a scene where stakeholders are geographically distributed, communication presents new challenges for research areas. Considering the characteristics of interpersonal communication and the virtual area where it is carried out, the importance of applying interdisciplinary approaches, such as Cognitive Engineering, is currently increasing. Particularly, our proposal aims at improving the interaction between stakeholders by applying learning models when eliciting distributed software requirements. These models might help characterise the way people interact with distributed environment abstracting information or procedures. Identifying a type of interaction a stakeholder is more suitable for, would led to the use of specific groupware tools as a way of improving communication during a requirements elicitation process.Eje: Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (ISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Structuring Business Processes and Eliciting Requirements at the Estonian Literary Museum

Suurtes organisatsioonides võib esineda probleeme äriprotsesside struktureerimisega. Sageli kasutatakse äriprotsesside kirjeldamiseks graafilisi mudeleid. Üldiselt nõustutakse, et keerulisi äriprotsesse on kergem mõista, kui neid kujutatakse kollektsiooni väikemate ja lihtsamate mudelitena. Protsesse kirjeldavad mudelid on samuti olulised informatsiooniallikad tarkvara süsteemi nõuete välja selgitamisel. Selles bakalaureuse töös käsitletakse Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi praktilist juhtumit, kuna neil esineb probleeme äriprotsesside struktureerimisega. Variatsioonidega äriprotsesside modelleerimiseks Kirjandusmuuseumis kasutatakse dekompositsioonist ajendatud äriprotsesside modelleerimise meetodit. Koostöös Kirjandusmuuseumi esindajatega luuakse mudelid, mis kirjeldavad aktuaalseid äriprotsesse. Protsessi mudelid koostatakse kasutades BPMN normatiive. Järgmisena kirjeldatakse tarkvara süsteemi poolt äriprotsessidele pakutavat süsteemi tuge. Kasutades protsessi mudeleid koos tarkvara süsteemitoe kirjeldusega ning BPMN mudelitest nõuete tuvastamise meetodit selgitatakse välja nõuded tarkvara süsteemile. Nende meetodite rakendamine Kirjandusmuuseumi juhtumis aitab nende äriprotsesse struktureerida ning tarkvara süsteemi nõudeid välja selgitada. Kuna äriprotsesside mudelid luuakse koostöös Kirjandusmuuseumi esindajatega ning nende mudelite aluseks on aktuaalsed äriprotsessid, siis tulemusena saadud mudelid ja nõudmised tarkvara süsteemile kirjeldavad Kirjandusmuuseumi tegelikke äriprotsesse.Business processes are often difficult to structure in large organisations. Business processes are often described by graphical process models. It is generally accepted that complex business processes are easier to understand when they are represented as a collection of smaller and simpler process models. Process models are also an important source of information for requirements elicitation. In this thesis the case of the Estonian Literary Museum (LM) is considered. The LM has problems with structuring their business processes. For modelling the business processes with variation at the LM, a decomposition-driven method is applied. In collaboration with the representatives of the LM, business process models describing the current business processes are created. Process models are created using the BPMN standard. Then software system support for the business processes is described. Using the process models with the software system support description and a method for requirements elicitation from BPMN models, the requirements for the software system are elicited. Applying these methods in the case study at the LM, helps structure the business processes and elicit the software system requirements. Since the business processes models are created in cooperation with the representatives from the LM and based on their current processes, the resulting models and software system requirements describe their actual business processes

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V