Noel Carroll

The Practitioner's Perspective on Clinical Pathway Support Systems

Context. Clinical pathway support system can ease the clinician burden by prompting appropriate actions at different stages of a patient consultation. However, while the attitudes of clinicians towards the use of these systems are overwhelmingly positive, system designers still encounter significant challenges to their use in the clinical enviroment. Aims. To explore the role of support systems in healthcare and whether the concept of decision support for clinical pathways is valid. Method. We conducted nineteen evaluations, interviews and questionnaires, with patient-facing healthcare professionals on the use of support systems in a clinical setting. Results. The results highlighted the perceived benefits and weaknesses of support systems. These results are presented as a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. Conclusions. While the logic of support systems in healthcare is evident, in the reality of clinical practice, other factors influence the success of these systems. This has significant implications for the acceptability and the relevance of support systems. The successful implementation and judicious use of these systems will need to develop an understanding of practitioner concerns.

Service capabilities within open innovation: Revisiting the applicability of capability maturity models

Purpose – Open innovation is an emerging paradigm which exposes organisations to networked capabilities and competencies though collaboration relationships. The traditional view of the organisational environment raises concerns regarding the mismatch in the methods used to assess business value and understanding service process maturity. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs a systematic literature review to present a state-of-the-art literature review with particular focus on the applicability of capability maturity models (CMM) within an open innovation context. Findings – The authors present a conceptual account of our research developments and build on the state-of-the-art which bridges open innovation and CMM. The authors provide a comprehensive discussion on the literature and challenge the applicability of individual organisations evolving through maturity stages. The authors identify a significant gap in the emergence of open innovation ...

A Decision Support System for Global Team Management: Expert Evaluation

Context: The literature is rich in examples of both successful and failed global software development projects. However, practitioners do not have the time to wade through the many recommendations to work out which ones apply to them. To this end, we developed a prototype Decision Support System (DSS) for Global Teaming (GT), with the goal of making research results available to practitioners. Aims: We want the system we build to be based on the real needs of practitioners: the end users of our system. Therefore the aim of this study is to assess the usefulness and usability of our proof-of-concept in order to create a tool that is actually used by practitioners. Method: Twelve experts in GSD evaluated our system. Each individual participant tested the system and completed a short usability questionnaire. Results: Feedback on the prototype DSS was positive. All experts supported the concept, although many suggested areas that could be improved. Both expert practitioners and researchers participated, providing different perspectives on what we need to do to improve the system. Conclusion: Involving both practitioners (users) and researchers in the evaluation elicited a range of useful feedback, providing useful insights that might not have emerged had we focused on one or the other group. However, even when we implement recommended changes, we still need to persuade practitioner to adopt the new tool.

Untangling the Complexity of Connected Health Evaluations

Societal changes are forcing us to reconsider how healthcare is delivered. Connected Health, which involves the application of ICT to support healthcare delivery, is an emerging trend in this space. A robust evaluation technique that considers the impact of Connected Health on society is a vital enabler for this growing area. For this reason, we developed an exploratory framework for the evaluation of Connected Health solutions. Our framework, which is built upon the Information Systems Success Model, was developed after having critically appraised the findings of earlier health information system evaluation studies. We identity the primary stakeholders and address their assessment needs from a multi-perspective viewpoint, for example effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we outline the framework and report on its application to a Connected Health solution for primary care based dementia patients in Ireland.

Towards the Development of a Cloud Service Capability Assessment Framework

Considering the complexity of today’s service environment, Small-to-Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford to accept the status quo of service operations, and therefore, they must have some clear business analytics objectives to reach. Without clear metric objectives, organisations are almost destined for disaster since the allocation of resources may not have responded to the demand exerted from outside of the organisation. This is particularly true within a complex and rapidly changing cloud computing environment. The cloud dynamic ecosystem is moving toward a collection of services which interoperate across the Internet. This chapter offers a discussion on an approach to assessing cloud capabilities through cloud service capability assessment framework (CSCAF). Service metrics play a critical role in CSCAF that presents managers with a practical framework to carry out cloud capability assessments. The process may be simply described as publishing, retrieving, and managing cloud service descriptions, service publications which are matched with descriptions of consumer’s requirements and service matching.

Key Success Factors for Smart and Connected Health Software Solutions

Healthcare delivery is being transformed by technology that personalizes, tracks, and manages patient information across devices. Smart and connected health will develop safer and more effective, efficient, equitable, and user-centered services through pervasive computing innovations.

Aligning healthcare innovation and software requirements through design thinking

In recent years, there has been significant growth in software companies across the healthcare sector developing new technologies to improve healthcare delivery and services. This has given rise to the emergence of Connected Health – a new model for healthcare management. This also places considerable emphasis on the process of software development in supporting Connected Health. In addition, it highlights the growing reliance and trust we place on software to support healthcare decisions. However, unlike many other sectors, such as business and education, failure to align healthcare needs with software requirements can have devastating consequences on people’s health and potentially cause death. Our research and experience with healthcare companies confirms the need to establish a Connected Health Innovation Framework using Design Thinking principles to a) support software developers in clearly identifying healthcare requirements and b) extend and enrich traditional software requirements gathering techniques. This paper presents an e-pharmacy case study and describes the impact this approach has within a Connected Health context.

Software-as-a-Medical Device: demystifying Connected Health regulations

Connected Health is an emerging and rapidly developing field never before witnessed across the healthcare sector. It has the potential to transform healthcare service systems by increasing its safety, quality and overall efficiency. However, as healthcare technologies or medical devices continuously rely more on software development, one of the core challenges is examining how Connected Health is regulated – often impacting Connected Health innovation. The purpose of this paper is to present an understanding of how Connected Health is regulated. Many of these regulatory developments fall under “medical devices”, giving rise to Software-as-a-Medical Device (SaaMD).,Through an extensive literature review, this paper demystifies Connected Health regulation. It presents the outcome of expert discussions which explore the key regulatory developments in the context of Connected Health to provide a practical guide to understanding how regulation can potentially shape healthcare innovation.,Several key issues are identified, and the authors present a comprehensive overview of regulatory developments relating to Connected Health with a view to support the continued growth of IT-enabled healthcare service models. The authors also identify the key challenges in Connected Health and identify areas for future research.,A key outcome of this research is a clearer understanding of the opportunities and challenges that regulation and standards present to Connected Health. Furthermore, this research is of critical importance in a first attempt towards recognising the impact of regulation and standards compliance in Connected Health.

The Discovery of Agile Service Networks through the Use of Social Network Analysis

There is a need to address the significant gap in our ability to measure and monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across service networks. The unprecedented growth in service-based business processes over a short period of time has underscored the need for understanding the mechanisms and theorising the business models and business process management adopted across many organisations today. This research presents a survey of the literature and argues that the inability of current Business Process Management (BPM) techniques to visualise and monitor web-enabled business processes prevents us from transforming information on network activity and infrastructures. This inhibits managers in anticipating change and adapting to more agile business practices in service science. Thus, this research-in-progress sets out to propose the need to develop a framework to enhance a manager’s ability to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) while improving business process restructuring practices through social network analysis (SNA).

Modelling Business Transactions Across Service Supply Chain Networks

This chapter is concerned with understanding the complex nature of service network environments with particular attention on exploring business transactions across supply chains. Although business transactions have been traditionally well documented throughout literature, what becomes apparent is that these approaches fail to capture the dynamic complexity of modern service supply chains. To address the problem, this chapter introduces a method to model supply chain behaviour which is of particular interest at the network design time and offers a conceptual view of extracting network analysis and process metrics. We introduce a business transaction language (BTL) to gain insight into the business transactions while we also explore the application of social network analysis (SNA) to model the dynamism of service networks. In doing so, the research sets out to generate greater service network intelligence and extend the service network ontology while visualising the transactional interaction landscape.