On the Design of IT-Enabled Self-Care Systems: A Socio-technical Perspective

Advances in information technology (IT) have resulted in a proliferation of IT-based solution to support the self-care and management for healthy individuals as well as patients with chronic conditions. Despite these advances, the adoption and diffusion of these solutions into practice is limited. The objective of this paper is to enhance adoption and diffusion by providing actionable recommendations for the design of IT systems for self-care. The recommendations are grounded in socio-technical design theory and in an extensive review of self-care literature. The findings indicate that despite the diversity of disease conditions, users, technologies, and implementation environments, IT-solutions for self-care often fail to encompass a holistic socio-technical view. The design of such systems will need to account for the intrinsic and interrelated characteristics of the underlying tasks, actors, technologies, and environment.