Design Theory to improve health evidence retrieval
This work addresses the challenge of improving evidence-based practice for health organizations, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing cloud services and theories without claiming broad SOTA impact.
The study tackled the problem of barriers to evidence-based clinical information retrieval for health organizations by designing a technology solution using Design Science Research, resulting in the creation of three novel artefacts (contextual model, unified architecture, and context-aware unified architecture) and a design theory to generalize findings.
Objective: Our study objective is to design a feasible technology solution for health organizations to remove barriers to evidence-based clinical information retrieval, and improve Evidence-Based Practice. Methods: Literature from 2010 to 2020 was reviewed to define problems in evidence-based clinical information retrieval with recommendations from literature used to define solution objectives. Design Science Research is used to complete three projects in a research stream using cloud services such as Web-Scale Discovery, Content Management System, Federated Access, Global Knowledgebase, and Document Delivery. Design thinking, systems thinking, and user-oriented theory of information need are adopted to construct a design theory. Results: The research stream produced three novel and innovative artefacts: a contextual model, a unified architecture, and a context-aware unified architecture which we evaluate as part of academic reviews, scholarly publications, and conference proceedings in various research stream stages. A fourth artefact or design theory is presented to generalize results as mature knowledge.