Mid Sweden University

This exploratory study identifies two existingconceptions of welfare technology identified from policy and practice. By using policy documents and previous research together with a survey of primary care managers and students, this paper identifies one wider and one narrower conception. The wider tends toinclude the whole society, making it difficult to specify end-user requirements, while the narrower focuses on the more vulnerable people in society, which can exclude possible users.

The Swedish government has recently invested millions in ‘welfare technologies’, which are aimed at both enhancing safety and solve the demographic problem of an increasing elderly population and a consequent lack of healthcare personnel. Studies have shown that when welfare technologies are implemented, core values are getting lost due to a lack of knowledge on how to transform the caregiving and care-taking relationship through the use of digital technology. This study investigates correspondences between values associated with two welfare technology definitions and the ideal-types of a welfare and an industrial society. The results show that the definition created by IT & Telecom Industries includes values that are similar to those of the industrial society ideal-type, while the definition created by the Swedish Auxiliary Institute includes values similar to those associated with the welfare society ideal-type. This shows a gap in value prioritization of the creators of these definitions, which leads to confusion regarding the purpose of welfare technologies.

Digitalisation in the form of new technologies and solutions is a rapid movement affecting the whole world.Home or assistive care has had a long period of trouble trying keep up, even though it is a promising area of application. As home care tries to catch up, rushing to implement technologies or IT systems can result in misfit solutions that do not satisfy their purpose. The values of healthcare meanthat measuring success of technology implementation is different than in production sectors. The main focus is patient satisfaction and should, therefore, also be included in any evaluation. The present study proposes a conceptual model that aims to facilitate considering both quantitative and qualitative data, including patient and caregiver values, whenmeasuring efficiency in healthcare management. The model combines multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to make it possible to handle both crisp and fuzzy values. The model is tested and evaluated using a home care case study, which shows promising results.

The recent increase in welfare technology implementation calls for the development of evaluation methods. Previous research has identified the need for a coherent evaluation model to create indicators that combine individual, economic and organizational dimensions. The Technology Implementation Evaluation Score (TIES) works in this way. It provides a score by combining statistical and monetary data (quantitative data) with patient and caregiver opinions (qualitative data). This paper aims to investigate the effects of including qualitative data on the outcome of the TIES model, compared to only using quantitative data. Various combinations of inputs are investigated by performing a sensitivity analysis using extreme value scenarios. The result shows that the TIES model is more affected by the number of data types created and the weight attached to each input than the data used as inputs. The assessment shows that the model is appropriately constructed for the current home care case.