Human-Centered Design and Benefit Realization Management in Digital Health Care Solution Development: Protocol for a Systematic Review

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 adopting 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 of health care software projects. To our 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 health care solutions. Therefore, there is a need for evidence synthesis using systematic reviews to address this potential research gap. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to examine if human-centered design helps benefit realization management processes in the development of digital health care solutions and thereby enables better benefit realization. We explore the evidence of assumed or confirmed benefits of using human-centered design in the health care domain and whether better results have been reported when the 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. 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 using human-centered design and benefit realization management has a positive effect on realizing set benefits in those projects. We will commence a systematic literature search using human-centered design, benefit realization management, and health care-related search terms within 5 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 2 reviewers. Any incongruities regarding whether to include articles for full-text review will be resolved by a 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 anticipate finding evidence of the use of human-centered design in the development of digital health care solutions. However, we expect evidence of benefitting from both human-centered design and benefit realization management in this context 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 health care solutions. The review will specifically focus on finding evidence of confirmed benefits derived from the use of human-centered design and benefit realization management. There may be an opportunity to gain a broader understanding of the tools or approaches that provide evidence of increased benefit realization within the health care domain. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/56125.

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