Gathering, structuring and describing information needs in home care: a method for requirements exploration in a "gray area".

The aim of our research is to develop a method for "requirements exploration"--gathering, structuring and describing requirements for information systems in previously weakly understood areas. In health care, information systems are usually developed for a single organization, or for information flow from one organization to another. In our case domain, multi-professional and multi-organizational home care, this approach is not very helpful. Moreover, home care takes place in "no-man's-land"; outside the organizations' infrastructure, in the customer's home, and technology is used scarcely. In this paper, we describe how information requirements were explored in this scantly understood domain by using an activity-theoretical approach. We also explain how this approach served our purposes. The method proved useful in grasping the network of activities and the information needs. The holistic nature of the method was particularly important, since technology is not the only solution to the needs we discovered.