A systemic, participative design of decision support services for clinical research

Development of IT-based services to support decision-making in healthcare should be guided by the following considerations: rigor, relevance, user-centered participation and inclusion of the best practices for IT-based service systems. In this paper, the balance between rigor and relevance is achieved by following the design science research methodology; user-centered participation is tackled from the socio-technical tradition in information systems; best practices considered in the planning, design and implementation of the services are informed by the MOF framework. Moreover, and considering the premise that these pillars should holistically converge, this research has been approached from a systemic stance where iterative, participative, socio-technical activities have allowed the effective collaboration between information systems researchers, clinical researchers, medical staff and administrative hospital personnel. This paper argues for a move towards enhancing systemic, participative, design-centered service systems engineering by reporting a case which applies these concepts for providing decisionsupport services, enabled by data and text mining techniques, to contribute to clinical research and administration by being able to search electronic health records where narrative text hides meaningful information that would otherwise require a time-consuming human revision of these records.