The need for requirements engineering in the development of clinical decision-support systems: a qualitative study

Insufficient requirements analysis has recently been suggested as a problem in clinical decision-support systems development. Therefore, to explore knowledge, practices and attitudes, key professionals in the area from four countries were interviewed regarding the early phases in the development process. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were performed and video-taped. As reference, documentation of the Action Design requirements engineering methodology was used. Two separate qualitative analyses of the data were made. The first was to identify central concepts and attitudes related to requirements engineering. In the second analysis, concrete circumstances surrounding decisions to use requirements engineering methods were investigated. This paper reports the results of the analyses and discusses changes in the planning and management of clinical decision-support projects in general, and it comments on development methods, using Action Design as reference. It is concluded that studies are needed to further investigate the problems real decision-support projects have to deal with. This knowledge can then be used to develop methods and tools which support design practices where existing structural, procedural and, building on this, technical obstacles are overcome.