The strategies used to evaluate healthcare issues, health information systems inclusive are all evaluated to gauge whether they support the six common goals of healthcare; safety, patient-centeredness, efficiency, timeliness, equitability and effectiveness (Littlejohns, Wyatt & Garvican, 2003). Strategies to evaluate health information systems differs slightly because they focus more on ensuring timeliness in delivery of services while they focus less on safety and diversity matters, multicultural healthcare among others healthcare issues.
When designing an Information System Evaluation Tool, it is important to consider the privacy of patient information, the security of the information gathered, its accuracy, capacity of the system, and the cost implications of maintaining the system (Bowen, 2012). Challenges that might be faced in that process include underestimating the complexity of healthcare issues in a given institution. Lack of competence among users of a given system as well as high costs of developing the system might also pose a challenge to development of an effective evaluation protocol.
The process of evaluating health information technology systems differs from other types of evaluation because it is designed to support the implementation (formative evaluation) and also to examine the costs and benefits (summative evaluation) of a particular information system (Littlejohns, Wyatt & Garvican, 2003). The deliverables of the evaluation should ensure the system supports clinical, administrative as well as monitoring purposes. Specific strategies for evaluating an information system might include testing for the system’s ability to handle massive data by feeding in excessive information. It may also include subjecting sample software to viral or malware attacks and evaluating the systems response (Bowen, 2012). Effectiveness of the system could be gauged by its ability to resist hackings, data loss due to viral attacks, failure of the system to slow down or crash when fed with massive data among other factors.
The main challenges to designing a successful information system evaluation are the cost implications, the lack of standard criteria to be used as the basis of the evaluation and lack of proper user understanding in the use of various evaluation tools.
References
Bowen S. (2012) "A Guide to Evaluation in Health Research - CIHR." / Canadian Institutes of Health Research Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada. http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/45336.html (accessed August 21, 2013).
Littlejohns, P., Wyatt J. C., & Garvican L. (2003) Evaluating computerized health information systems: hard lessons still to be learnt. British Medical Journal 326(7394): 860–863.
