Requirements engineering in the health care domain

There are many different approaches to elicit requirements, each having strengths and weaknesses. Hence, some approaches may be more suitable to one domain than another. Moreover, some domains may require these approaches to be carefully applied or even adapted to work efficiently. Health care domain is one of these domains. It is a complex domain with many subtleties, such as political and legal issues that have to be taken into account. This work brings some of the lessons learned in more than six years working with several hospitals and laboratories. Particularly, this paper presents some elicitation techniques that had to be adapted in order to comply with the constraints imposed by several peculiarities intrinsic to this domain. It also points out some special considerations that must be taken into account regardless the method one chooses to elicit requirements.