Health and Social Care: Towards an Understanding of Wellness Management and the Role of IS

Publicly provided healthcare systems are coming under increasing pressure worldwide because of aging populations, increased prevalence of chronic disease and spiralling healthcare costs. This pressure can be alleviated by focusing on community-based healthcare and empowering people to proactively manage their own general wellness. To this end, many employee wellness programmes have been launched, as have many technologies to measure specific aspects of wellness. However, wellness is a poorly understood concept and effective wellness-management is elusive and lacking in metrics. In light of this deficit, this research-in-progress draws on activity theory and attribute substitution theory to propose a preliminary model describing how wellness is managed by various actors (e.g. the individual, family carers, healthcare professionals) in the collaborative wellness management activity. The study's empirical data gathering reveals that wellness management is often inhibited because of an inability of these actors to access and reflect on the contextual factors that mediate the activity of managing wellness (i.e. the rules that guide them, the division of roles and responsibilities, and the tools that are utilised in managing wellness).