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To promote access to their services, health-care companies provide various communication channels to their customers (beneficiaries) to enable the receipt of requests, such as authorization for examinations, procedures and hospitalizations. Under the approach of innovation studies, the management of customer relationship channels for health-care companies is characterized as a knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS). The purpose of this study is presenting innovation as a strategy to increase customer service productivity, as well as the monitoring of the quality of the service, the generation of health information for beneficiaries and compliance with the regulation set by the Brazilian National Health Agency (ANS).

The study is characterized as an applied research, as it proposes solutions to problems faced by supplemental health-care companies using the strategy of action research, i.e. an independent, social research with an empirical basis.

The result of this study shows that a computerized health-care system can increase productivity by 21.96%, and it presents an innovative solution for health-care companies to guarantee the process of meeting the demands and requests of their beneficiaries, ensuring the compliance with ANS regulations.

These results can be replicated to other healthcare companies and contribute to those seeking innovation, increased productivity and quality improvements in their services.

This work was also motivated by the lack of lstudies in the areas of health-care companies in Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to retrieve similar questions in online health communities to improve the efficiency of health information retrieval and sharing.

This paper proposes a hybrid approach to combining domain knowledge similarity and topic similarity to retrieve similar questions in online health communities. The domain knowledge similarity can evaluate the domain distance between different questions. And the topic similarity measures questions’ relationship base on the extracted latent topics.

The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline methods.

This method conquers the problem of word mismatch and considers the named entities included in questions, which most of existing studies did not.

This study aims to identify user perception of different qualities of optical character recognition (OCR) in texts. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of different quality OCR on users' subjective perception through an interactive information retrieval task with a collection of one digitized historical Finnish newspaper.

This study is based on the simulated work task model used in interactive information retrieval. Thirty-two users made searches to an article collection of Finnish newspaper Uusi Suometar 1869–1918 which consists of ca. 1.45 million autosegmented articles. The article search database had two versions of each article with different quality OCR. Each user performed six pre-formulated and six self-formulated short queries and evaluated subjectively the top 10 results using a graded relevance scale of 0–3. Users were not informed about the OCR quality differences of the otherwise identical articles.

The main result of the study is that improved OCR quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper articles positively: higher relevance scores are given to better-quality texts.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this simulated interactive work task experiment is the first one showing empirically that users' subjective relevance assessments are affected by a change in the quality of an optically read text.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the conceptual issues of information behaviour research by reviewing the approaches to information interaction in the context of information seeking and retrieval (IS&R).

The study uses the conceptual analysis focussing on four pioneering models for interactive IS&R proposed by Belkin, Ingwersen and Ingwersen and Järvelin.

A main characteristic of models for information interaction is the tripartite setting identifying information resources accessible through information systems, intermediary/interface and user. Dialogue is a fundamental constituent of information interaction. Early models proposed by Belkin and Ingwersen focussed on the dialogue occurring in user-intermediary interaction, while more recent frameworks developed by Ingwersen and Järvelin devote more attention to dialogue constitutive of user-information system interaction.

As the study focusses on four models developed within the period of 1984-2005, the findings cannot be generalised to depict the phenomena of information interaction as a whole. Further research is needed to model the specific features of information interaction occurring in the networked information environments in particular.

The study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the ways in which pioneering researchers have conceptualised the phenomena of interaction in the context of IS&R. The findings contribute to the elaboration of the conceptual space of information behaviour research.

Deployment of knowledge management systems (KMSs) suffers from low adoption in organizational reality that is attributed to a lack of perceivable added value for people in actual work situations. Poor task/technology fit in the process of knowledge retrieval appears to be a major factor influencing this issue. Existing research indicates a lack of re-contextualizing stored information provided by KMSs in a particular situation. Existing research in the area of organizational memory information systems (OMISs) has thoroughly examined and widely discussed the topic of re-contextualization. The purpose of this paper, thus, is to examine how KMS design can benefit from OMIS research on approaches for re-contextualization in knowledge retrieval.

This paper examines OMIS literature and inductively derives a categorization scheme for KMS according to their strategy of re-contextualizing knowledge. The authors have validated the scheme validated in a multiple case study that examines the differentiatory value of the scheme for approaches with various re-contextualization strategies.

The classification scheme allows a step-by-step selection of approaches for re-contextualization of information in KMS design and development derived from OMIS research. The case study has demonstrated the applicability of the developed scheme and shows that the differentiation criteria can be applied unambiguously.

Because of the chosen case study approach for validation, the validation results may lack generalizability.

The scheme enables an informed selection of KMSs appropriate for a particular OMIS use case, as the scheme’s attributes serve as design rationale for a certain architecture or constellation of components. Developers can not only select from various approaches when designing re-contextualizaton but also come up with rationales for each candidate because of structured representation. Hence, stakeholders can be supported in a more informed way and design KMSs more effectively along organizational change processes.

The paper addresses an identified need for systematic characterization of KMS approaches and systems intending to meet the objectives of OMISs. As such, it allows streamlining further research in this field, as approaches can be judged according to their originality and positioned relative to each other.