Summary
Background: This paper reports on work carried out to elicit information needs at a trans-disciplinary,
nurse-managed health care clinic that serves a medically disadvantaged urban population.
The trans-disciplinary model provides a “one-stop shop” for patients who can receive
a wide range of services beyond traditional primary care. However, this model of health
care presents knowledge sharing challenges because little is known about how data
collected from the non-traditional services can be integrated into the traditional
electronic medical record (EMR) and shared with other care providers. There is also
little known about how health information technology (HIT) can be used to support
the workflow in such a practice.
Objectives: The objective of this case study was to identify the information needs of care providers
in order to inform the design of HIT to support knowledge sharing and distributed
decision making.
Methods: A participatory design approach is presented as a successful technique to specify
requirements for HIT applications that can support a trans-disciplinary model of care.
Results: Using this design approach, the researchers identified the information needs of care
providers working at the clinic and suggested HIT improvements to integrate non-traditional
information into the EMR. These modifications allow knowledge sharing among care providers
and support better health decisions.
Conclusions: We have identified information needs of care providers as they are relevant to the
design of health information systems. As new technology is designed and integrated
into various workflows it is clear that understanding information needs is crucial
to acceptance of that technology.
Keywords
Information needs - participatory design - requirements analysis and design - clinical
information technology - nursing workflow - provider-provider communications
