Requirements elicitation for ICT-systems in public healthcare : Challenges with a user-centered, agile way of working

Abstract: Swedish healthcare has been undergoing significant changes in the last decade and continues to develop at a rapid pace. The Swedish government has set a goal to be the best in the world at using eHealth to achieve good and equal health and welfare in 2025. With this fast development comes challenges, and information and communication technology (ICT) systems that are currently being used in healthcare are not fulfilling the end-users' needs. Inadequately designed systems lead to frustration among users and negatively impact the quality of care. The first step of all system development is requirement elicitation. The requirements later constitute the ground for the new system, hence it is highly important that the requirement specification is written with the end-users' needs in focus. In this project, four organizations working with system development for the public healthcare industry were interviewed regarding their way of working with requirement elicitation. They were asked questions regarding how they collected and analyzed data from their possible end-users, and what influenced their choice of methods. In all organizations, the goal was to work with user-centered design in agile projects. The most common data collection methods were interviews and field studies. However, the interviewees experienced that they were limited in their choice of data collection methods because of time and economic constraints. The interviewees also expressed concerns regarding the current legislation and structure of the Swedish healthcare system and how it has not kept up with the rapid digitalization process. This project gives insight into how requirement elicitation is made for ICT systems in Swedish healthcare, and some of the challenges the developing organizations face in their work.