Applying Continual Service Improvement Practices to Study Quality of Healthcare Information System Services: A Case Study

Abstract

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) plays a critical role in increasing the quality of IT services leading to better customer satisfaction. However, a key challenge in service management is that service provider organizations do not identify CSI activities although they carry out improvements task on daily basis. An ad hoc approach to CSI may result in delays in improvement projects, poor transparency of improvements tasks and lack of focus in service improvement. The research problem of this study is: how to manage service-related improvements with ISO/IEC 20000 compliant CSI model. The main contribution of this paper is to study how service-related improvements are managed. By using case study methodology, we shall describe how CSI can be applied to healthcare information system services. Case study results are analyzed through a Socio-Technical System (STS) view. Our results show that service improvements can be managed with an ERP system including CSI records, workflows and status monitoring of CSI. Additionally, applying CSI to healthcare information systems requires a new set of skills from service managers covering service management, healthcare and medical device regulation. Finally, we show that multiactor network may cause challenges to CSI such as coordinating multiple vendors, stakeholders and customer representatives.