Organizational, Contextual and User-Centered Design in e-Health: Application in the Area of Telecardiology

Currently, one of the main issues of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the area of e-Health is the design of telemedicine services based on the study of interactions established between people and new technologies. Nevertheless, the research in HCI has been mainly focused from a cognitive point of view, and most studies don’t consider other variables related to the social impact of technology. This gap is extremely important in e-Health, because Information Systems (IS) changes qualitatively work processes in health organizations. In this paper we present an interdisciplinary perspective that includes the cognitive and organizational aspects to the technical design of new e-Health services in the area of telecardiology. The results obtained permit to accurately define not only technical requirements and network resources management, but also user requirements, contextual particularities of the scenarios where these services could be implemented and the IS impact in organizational processes. Moreover, the ethnographical methodology proposed has been applied to specific emergencies scenarios, obtaining conclusions that allow new user-centered designs that can be directly integrated in medical practice in an efficient way.