Collaborative social modeling for designing a patient wellness tracking system in a nurse-managed health care center

There has been an increasing need for developing health information systems for improving clinical processes and outcomes. Deeply understanding and accurately capturing the information needs of the stakeholders is crucial to successfully designing and deploying such a system. Empirical study on "effective" methodologies for requirements analysis for information system design is one of the important aspects in design science research in information systems. In this paper, we present our case study on exploring a goal-oriented requirements analysis technique called the i* framework for eliciting and modeling the requirements for a patient wellness tracking (PWT) system in a nurse-managed health care services center. The center employs a transdisciplinary care approach for managing illnesses. The innovation and complexity in the health care approach brings about many challenges in designing a PWT system that always provides positive impacts on the current workflows at the center. The system is aimed to maintain information about a wide variety of health and wellness services provided to patients. We want to thoroughly elicit the requirements through modeling the socio-technical environment and analyzing the goals of stakeholders through a collaborative approach. For this purpose, we explored the i* framework and introduced two adaptations in order to meet our needs in eliciting and capturing requirements. Our preliminary experience in this case study demonstrates that using the i* approach with our adaptations is a potentially effective method for eliciting, modeling, capturing, and validating the requirements of healthcare information systems.