Perspectives for Interdisciplinary Methodological Approaches for Technology Research in Healthcare: Impacts of Emerging Resources and Tools

Introduction

Information technology professionals, as any workers in tech fields, perceived fast moving changes in the markets they work several times. It occurred with the distributed processing introduction, commercial Internet availability, mobile information systems, graphical interface platforms and operational integration software, just to mention the more remarkable and widely noticed changes. These and other changes cannot be disregarded as organizational pressures, determining strategy formulation modifications and their consequent impacts (Lacerda and Jamil, 2021).

Remarkably, in the last years, several factors contributed to promote another wave of technology insertion for professionals and organizations, as a new set of technologies emerged in the continuum of social media dissemination, sharing economy evolution and the incessant economy movements, which demanded quick answers for companies, NGOs, governments, and any other human associations. Worryingly, these changes are sometimes implemented without the needed study development, a solid theoretical background exploration and, even, the simple historic follow-up of some unfolding, like those cited above, as a source of best practices.

Unfortunately, this is a scenario which could lead to wrong decision-making, as to privilege only the tech view for investments and implementations, repeating some mistakes that happened in the previous failures of plans and projects, originally designed to provide insertion of technologies in organizational tasks. Observing the business context, with lack of objective definition for goals and scenario studies, as it happens with the “Startup economy” facing the Covid pandemic, it is expected that these competitive arenas can be more troubled even in the sake of economy retake, after the deep crisis faced in the period of 2020 (Lacerda and Jamil, 2021).

In this chapter I offer my points of view regarding the validity and need to observe and study such contexts from multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary methodological approaches. This posture is advised because of technological insertion, implication and impacts in modern organizations structures, processes, and projects. As it has been discussed, becoming a motto for this chapter, technology research and applied studies tend to be benefited and turn out to be more applicable, if the central theme - technology itself - it is not kept alone, as the dominant objective, except for specific studies, focusing internal and fundamental aspects of technological development, prior to a potential usage (Jamil, 2005; 2021a, McKinsey, 2021).

As a motivation, it is possible to expect, for a study or observation where different fields are called to cooperate in one context, that these different experiences, results, stories, behaviors and overall conceptions can lead to a richer way of analysis, producing not only a deeper outcome, but, more, fast and robust results, which can be appreciated by practitioners, for their usage of tools and methods, answering the fast consumption behavior usually adopted nowadays.

Thinking this way, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are comprehensible postures for methodological choices, building up techniques and tools, allowing a research base which can produce for practitioners, allowing research continuity and open relationship with several other fields (Zaman and Gachin, 2010). But, for this promise to be fulfilled, these approaches must be comprehended (Ribeiro and Medeiros, 2015; Noll-Minor, 2019).

The choice made for this chapter development was to present a discussion about these three methodological principles, their associations, and relations, briefly evaluate emerging technologies trends and consider them as applied in the Healthcare arena, in an intended contribution for this book reading and applicability.