Functional requirements as an integral part of the design and development process: summary and recommendations

The Health Care Professional Workstation (HCPW) provides a portal to the health care system as a whole. Through this portal the health care professional must be able to carry out a wide variety of tasks in an integrated fashion. Traditional health care information systems have not been designed to support this kind of use, so the functional requirements development process must be capable of leading to an architecture and components for a system that will support such use. A variety of approaches may be employed to develop functional requirements, which may be used singly or in combination. Recommendations for this activity center on domain delineation, evaluation efforts to establish the most effective approaches, detailed functional requirement development, evaluation of the developed functional requirements, creation of shared resources, and education and training in the use of the tools and methodologies.