- Etiquette-Based Sociotechnical Design

Telehealth and telecare have been heralded as major mechanisms by which frail elderly people can continue to live at home but numerous pilot studies have not led to the adoption of these technologies as mainstream contributors to the health and social care of people in the community. This paper reviews why dissemination has proved difficult and concludes that one problem is that these technologies require considerable organisational changes if they are to be effective: successful implementation is not just a technical design issue but is a sociotechnical design challenge. The paper reviews the plans of 25 health communities in England to introduce integrated health and social care for the elderly. It concludes that these plans when implemented will produce organisational environments conducive to the mainstream deployment of telehealth and telecare. However, the plans focus on different kinds of integrated care and each makes different demands on telehealth and telecare. Progress on getting mainstream benefits from telehealth and telecare will therefore depend on building a number of different sociotechnical systems geared to different forms of integrated care and incorporating different forms of telehealth and telecare.

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A Drifting Service Development

Phenomenology, Organizational Politics, and IT Design ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-0303-5.ch017 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 311-323 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Kai-Uwe Loser ◽

Alexander Nolte ◽

Michael Prilla ◽

Rainer Skrotzki ◽

Thomas Herrmann

Keyword(s):

Assisted Living ◽

Ambient Assisted Living ◽

Service Development ◽

Technology Usage ◽

Complex Environments ◽

Work Processes ◽

Integrated Development ◽

Technical Aspects ◽

Sociotechnical Design ◽

Digital Pen

Drift is one of the visible phenomena observed in an ambient assisted living project. In this project, services for elderly people were developed that would be ordered using a digital pen technology. In this project, the method of the Sociotechnical Walkthrough (STWT) for an integrated development was applied to clarify technology usage, technical aspects, and the work processes. This approach was combined with several other methods to form a multi-facetted sociotechnical design approach. During the course of the project several shifts in perspectives, breakdowns of understanding, and negotiations could be observed. This chapter describes how using this approach of sociotechnical design facilitated the identification of drift phenomena and its processing in service design. The authors observations also clearly show the limitations of up-front process planning for complex environments such as service processes.

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