JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Earlier research shows that a significant number of resources are wasted on software projects delivering less than the planned benefits. It has however been evidenced that taking a human-centered design approach when designing health devices can be beneficial. This understanding from earlier research has raised our interest in investigating how human-centered design might contribute to realizing the potential benefits within healthcare software projects. To current knowledge, this intersection of human-centered design and benefit realization management has not yet comprehensively and consistently been researched within the context of digital healthcare solutions. Therefore, there is a need for evidence synthesis using systematic review to address this potential research gap.

Objective:

Objective of this study is to examine if human-centered design helps benefit realization management process in the development of digital healthcare solutions and thereby enables better benefit realization. We explore the evidence of assumed or confirmed benefits of using human-centered design in healthcare domain and whether better results have been reported when benefit realization management process is followed.

Methods:

This protocol was developed following the PRISMA-P (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols) guidelines for systematic review protocols. The proposed review would use a planned and systematic approach to identify, evaluate, and synthesize relevant and recent studies (reported in English) to see if there is evidence that utilizing human-centered design and benefit realization management has a positive effect on realizing set benefit in those projects. We will commence a systematic literature search using human-centered design, benefit realization management, and healthcare related search terms within five repositories (ACM Digital Library, PubMed Central, Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science). After removing duplicate results, a preliminary scan for titles and abstracts will be done by at least two reviewers. Any incongruities about whether to include the article for full-text review or not will be resolved by the third reviewer based on the predefined criteria.

Results:

Initial queries of 2086 records have been executed and papers are being prescreened for inclusion. The search was initiated in December 2023 and the results are expected in 2024. We expect to find evidence of utilization of human-centered design in the development of digital healthcare solutions. However, evidence of benefitting from both human-centered design and benefit realization management in this context is expected to be scarce.

Conclusions:

This protocol will guide the review of existing literature on the use of human-centered design and benefit realization management when developing digital healthcare solutions. The review will specifically focus on finding evidence of confirmed benefits derived from the usage of human-centered design and benefit realization management. There may be an opportunity to provide a wider understanding of the tools or approaches providing evidence of increased benefit realization within healthcare domain.