Enhancing e-health systems through health process modelling and requirements engineering

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

E-Health research is a growing area in the multidisciplinary sectors of public health, business and information technology. Any innovation emerging from the research has the potential to lead to more efficient healthcare delivery, enhanced quality of health services, and more effective use of infrastructure and resources. Recent highly technology driven e-Health innovations and systems driven by high technology have often failed to meet end users’ requirements. This is largely because, when designing and developing an e-Health system intended to meet a health organisation’s expectations, the issue of understanding the e-Health environment has been largely ignored from the exiting e-health methodologies. The findings of our literature review indicate that most of the current e-Health innovations and systems are highly driven by technology and have often failed to meet health organisation expectations and end-user requirements. Therefore, there is a need for a new approach when designing and developing an e-Health system that focuses, not only on using an appropriate requirements engineering process, but also on the e-Health environment. This thesis investigates how e-Health systems can be enhanced through health process modelling and requirements engineering. To this end, we first propose a manual approach to modelling and analysing the health process and the associated health business goals in the context of e-Health system requirements. Second, we develop an automated approach to modelling and analysing health processes and obtaining e-Health system requirements, with a view to overcoming the dynamicity that characterises the eHealth environment. Third, we propose an approach to modelling and mapping the security requirements in our proposed health process model to protect the health process against security threats. Fourth, we propose and present a brainstorming-based methodology for extracting health process activities. To validate our research, we develop case studies involving three different health organisations. The results obtained from these case studies surrounding the proposed approaches for developing an e-Health system include several significant findings: (1) modelling and analysing health processes and associated health goals before implementing the process not only helps systems analysts to understand the eHealth environment better but also helps in deriving more appropriate e-Health system requirements; (2) automated modelling and analysis of the health process can greatly reduce human effort in achieving a timely delivery of an e-Health system; (3) linking and mapping security requirements is vital to protect the health process effectively from security threats; and (4) extracting health process activities prior to the modelling and analysing phase is crucial in identifying patterns in the health process activities and system requirements.