Represents a need that an Information System should fulfill. Requirements can be functional (what the software or component should do, a functionality), non-functional (how the system will do, that is, constraints or qualities) and environmental (imposed constraints such as legal restrictions or standards). This classification can be seen from the user point of view (understandable for stakeholders) or from the system point of view (on a technical and more detailed level).
Published in Chapter:
Identifying Requirements for Healthcare Information Systems with Focus Groups
Carla Farinha (Opensoft/IST, Portugal) and Miguel Mira da Silva (INOV/IST, Portugal)
Copyright: © 2013
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3986-7.ch026
Abstract
Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) are essential in the healthcare industry since they manipulate vital information. For example, HIS may keep track of the patient’s medical history, avoiding mistakes with medications, dosages, and treatments. However, the traditional methods for identifying HIS requirements focus on specifying functional requirements for the software. Moreover, system scope should be fully understood by stakeholders, such as healthcare workers and hospital managers, something extremely difficult to achieve in practice. As such, many requirements are incomplete, missing, or not needed, leading to expensive and inadequate HIS. The authors identify requirements for Healthcare Information System using Focus Groups. They evaluate this method with experiments, applying a variety of techniques and having encouraging preliminary results. In particular, they verify that stakeholders can reach consensus on high-level requirements by discussing different perspectives about the system scope. The authors conclude that Focus Groups are really effective.