Design of an open social e-service for assisted living

Abstract

E-government has emerged as one of the most promising means to reform the public sector. E-government is now being used to improve services for assisted living. The purpose of assisted living services is to provide ways for elderly people to continue to live at home. However, these services require formal decisions by local government officials. Therefore Swedish municipalities aim to move control toward citizens to reduce authoritative barriers and to simplify administration. In this paper we report experiences from developing an open social e-service for assisted living. The major objectives are to relocate control to the citizen and to establish a highly integrated and efficient administrative process. It is designed to meet legal requirements of the Swedish Social Services Act. In order to achieve the objectives several process innovation techniques have been applied. During the design process we experienced several legal, organizational and technical challenges which we report in this paper. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.