Developing A Decision Support System for Healthcare Practices: A Design Science Research Approach

We propose a new approach for designing a decision support system (DSS) for the transformation of healthcare practices. Practice transformation helps practices transition from their current state to patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model of care. Our approach employs activity theory to derive the elements of practice transformation by designing and integrating two ontologies: a domain ontology and a task ontology. By incorporating both goal-oriented and task-oriented aspects of the practice transformation process and specifying how they interact, our integrated design model for the DSS provides prescriptive knowledge on assessing the current status of a practice with respect to PCMH recognition and navigating efficiently through a complex solution space. This knowledge, which is at a moderate level of abstraction and expressed in a language that practitioners understand, contributes to the literature by providing a formulation for a nascent design theory. We implement the integrated design model as a DSS prototype; results of validation tests conducted on the prototype indicate that it is superior to the existing PCMH readiness tracking tool with respect to effectiveness, usability, efficiency, and sustainability.