Taxonomy Development in Health-IT

Health-IT is attracting increasing attention in the research community. To understand the relevant constructs and the relationships among them, many authors present taxonomies or typologies for classifying different things in health-IT. Even with much attention to health-IT, there is still limited theoretical knowledge in this field. This may be attributed to our observation that the process of developing taxonomies has not been adequately addressed in the health-IT literature. In this paper we address this challenge by (a) a comprehensive literature survey that shows a high diversity in the field and that the related discussion of the structural nature has largely been ad hoc, (b) presenting methods for developing health-IT taxonomies, and, (c) contributing to the theoretical foundations of the field by a taxonomy for health-IT applications.