An open financial services architecture based on the use of intelligent mobile devices

The scope of this paper is to explore, analyze and develop a universal architecture that supports mobile payments and mobile banking, taking into consideration the third and the emerging fourth generation communication technologies. Interaction and cooperation between payment and banking systems, integration of existing technologies and exploitation of intelligent procedures provide the prospect to develop an open financial services architecture (OFSA), which satisfies requirements of all involved entities. A unified scenario is designed and a prototype is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture.     

Task support of electronic patient care report (ePCR) systems in emergency medical services: An elaboration likelihood model lens

This paper aims to investigate the antecedents of task support in the context of electronic patient care report (ePCR) in the emergency medical service (EMS). Although electronic health record has generated significant interest, the area of EMS has been largely overlooked in the literature. This study examines characteristics related to the ePCR system—information quality, security protection, and normative cues—and their impact on EMS task support, through the lens of the elaboration likelihood model. We further propose a moderating role of absorptive capacity and top management belief as elaboration likelihoods. Several theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.     

Bridging the IT Adoption Gap for Small Physician Practices: An Action Research Study on Electronic Health Records

This article reports on an action research project to investigate the barriers to adoption and assimilation of electronic health records (EHRs) in small physician practices. The project draws on theories of technology-use mediation and communities of practice to develop interventions to promote adoption and integration of EHRs into chronic care management processes in these practice settings. The field results suggest that developing community-based knowledge and resources to assist physician organizations one-on-one may be essential for their effective utilization of EHRs.     

An integrated approach based on execution measures for the continuous improvement of business processes realized by services

ContextOrganizations are rapidly adopting Business Process Management (BPM) as they focus on their business processes (BPs), seeing them to be key elements in controlling and improving the way they perform their business. Business Process Intelligence (BPI) takes as its focus the collection and analysis of information from the execution of BPs for the support of decision making, based on the discovery of improvement opportunities. Realizing BPs by services introduces an intermediate service layer that enables us to separate the specification of BPs in terms of models from the technologies implementing them, thus improving their modifiability by decoupling the model from its implementation.ObjectiveTo provide an approach for the continuous improvement of BPs, based on their realization with services and execution measurement. It comprises an improvement process to integrate the improvements into the BPs and services, an execution measurement model defining and categorizing several measures for BPs and service execution, and tool support for both.MethodWe carried out a systematic literature review, to collect existing proposals related to our research work. Then, in close collaboration with business experts from the Hospital General de Ciudad Real (HGCR), Spain, and following design science principles, we developed the methods and artifacts described in this paper, which were validated by means of a case study.ResultsWe defined an improvement process extending the BP lifecycle with measurement and improvement activities, integrating an execution measurement model comprising a set of execution measures. Moreover, we developed a plug-in for the ProM framework to visualize the measurement results as a proof-of-concept prototype. The case study with the HGCR has shown its feasibility.ConclusionsOur improvement vision, based on BPs realized by services and on measurement of their execution, in conjunction with a systematic approach to integrate the detected improvements, provides useful guidance to organizations.