I came across two new articles on evaluation in health informatics.
- Ammenwerth E, Shaw NT. Bad health informatics can kill – is evaluation the answer? Methods of Information in Medicine 2005;44:1-3.
- Ammenwerth E, de Keizer N. An inventory of evaluation studies of information technology in health care: Trends in evaluation research 1982 – 2002. Methods of Information in Medicine. 2005;44:44-56.
The first is an editorial by Ammenwerth and Shaw proposing that continuous, context-based evaluation could be one of the means of improving the use and implementation of information technology in health care. What I found most interesting about the editorial was how the authors propose embedding evaluation within a decision making framework. Also, an explicit reference to the Innsbruck declaration on health informatics evaluation (more to come on this topic during a future post).
The second article reports on the development of an inventory of evaluation studies of information technology in health care between 1982-2002. What I found interesting in this paper was that the authors only searched the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed – what about other biomedical indices like EMBASE or CINAHL? The description of the analysis and categorization of articles was very well done.