Assessing the Role of a Site Visit in Adopting Activity Driven Methods

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1. Introduction: How to teach socio-technical analysis in healthcare?

Healthcare is highly information-intensive; i.e., healthcare activities rely heavily on information being transferred between patients and various care providers, collected, stored, processed and used. The purposeful use of information within activities can be seen as a socio-technical information system (IS) [1, 2], within which information technology (IT; manual or computer-based) is used as a means of work by individual actors or as a means of coordination and communication between actors [3]. To develop such socio-technical systems, the focus should on the work activities as the basic unit of analysis, instead of the IT artefacts embedded in the IS [4].

The Activity Driven (AD) approach on Information Systems Development (ISD) has been studied and developed in the University of Eastern Finland (University of Kuopio until 2009) since the early 1990s [5, 3], with the main focus on healthcare activities and healthcare information systems. It is a socio-technical and participatory approach based on Activity Theory [6] with the primary goal of providing methods that emphasize the intertwined development of work and IS. The approach encourages IS developers and “users” (e.g., healthcare providers) to study collaboratively how different kinds of work activities are actually arranged and conducted, including what kind of information and technology do the actors need within those activities.

The approach comprises several interrelated parts, including the Activity Analysis and Design (ActAD) framework [5], the Activity Driven Information Systems Development Model (AD ISD) [3], and a methodology for depicting healthcare “landscapes” [7]. Some initial practical meth...

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