Table 3 Functional requirements – categories and exemplary quotes

Data Security:

F1: You [person’s name] have already mentioned data security, but from my experience I can tell that it’s very important. Affected persons are often worried about some kind of stigmatisation and they are concerned that information is leaked and spread in the company, so you have to provide confidence-building measures, that’s the most important aspect at this point. (OP, FG1)

F2: I would like to give another example: During the corona pandemic, there were many challenges concerning therapy sessions being offered online/ and many patients were reluctant and concerned that data protection was violated […] and what I found very helpful to increase patient trust was that you were only allowed to use systems that had been approved by the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, because people generally trust such a system. (Psych, FG1)

F3: Yes, I think it’s best if such a system is not located at the employer but rather externally, so that you can really assure the patient that you are only involved as an occupational physician because you are responsible for the person and that this is not related to the employer. (OP, FG1)

F4: And it must be completely transparent for the employee who has access to the data and to what extent. (OP, FG4)

F5: I think a general area for almost everyone would be important and certain restricted areas where patients could actively give access to selected people if desired.. (CIM, FG1)

Functions for communication and collaboration

F6: In the context of the quickly advancing digitalisation […] I have to say that there’s a huge advantage of this chat-function, you know? So that you have a programme that shows notifications, and you don’t have to start the e-mail programme, for example. This is then also related to the encoding of messages, isn’t it? […] So that you have a separate IT platform that enables a secure chat function, for example. This would be the best idea, I think. You could quickly send someone a short message. I often experience that you don’t have time to immediately answer the phone or that the other person doesn’t because they are doing a treatment or are busy otherwise. A chat function would solve this problem as you could just send a short message: Listen, we need to talk about this topic again. When can we talk on the phone? I think this always works better than sending three e-mails back and forth. (OP, FG4)

F7: We were actually using a management system for appointments. […] This means if both parties agree via management-system/ every Monday at 11 a.m., there is a free hour and you can write down a [appointment with a] therapist or someone belonging to the occupational physicians with my cooperation partner, this already helps quite a lot. […] And they customise the systems, for example, so they also make sure that patients are reminded the day before and so on. (Psych, FG2)

F8: It’s similar to team coordination. I think it’s really good, also concerning implementation, to make everything more transparent and to be able to display what is achieved, achieved in the CIM team and along with the employee in order to restore one’s health. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for me to implement it, when you have so many company sites and you have to work with many occupational therapists and there is no contact person or the CIM team cannot do it to this extent. (CIM, FG2)

F9: I would also do it like this. You should be able to simply tick the basic aspects. Night work, shift work, all these things. You might also mention current work times per day, six hours or nine hours, eight hours, you name it. That you could also have small spaces for short notes. But mainly checkboxes with the most significant aspects. And also room for free text where you can describe the current individual symptoms so that you have a sheet, some kind of referral, with the most important information. (OP, FG5)

F10: Especially for these cases, you could also use the BDI-II, for example, which has 20 questions like this, it can be completed within 10 minutes, or there is also the Symptom checklist 90. It covers general psychiatric symptoms. It’s a longer questionnaire that could be filled out by the employee, and you could implement the results in such a system, and you could detect where the standard value is exceeded. (OP, FG1)

General requirements

F11: It is necessary to have a responsible IT support who can be contacted and who takes care of possible issues. We are currently experiencing that with our software. No support, no one. Nobody is responsible. Nobody customises the software. It’s horrible. (OP, FG1)

F12: So, it has to be smart, and it has to be adaptable, I can speak from experience. We might need something completely different in 5 years, so it shouldn’t be a fixed product that can’t be changed easily, for example, according to different legal requirements or stakeholders’ requirements. I would really pay attention to this, that you tell the IT provider to “keep it simple”, but to make it easily adaptable at the same time. (OP, FG1)

F13: It should be intuitive. This means that it should be simple in operation, so that you can use it with few instructions and without any training. (Psych, FG1)