User-centered evaluation model for medical digital libraries

Abstract

It remains unclear whether the recent explosion of medical Internet Digital Libraries (DLs), enabled by substantial investments into eHealth by national governments and international agencies, has brought the desired improvements. As ultimately life-critical applications, medical DLs play a crucial role in delivering evidence to professionals and empowering patients. However, little attention has been given to impact evaluation with domain experts in real settings to assess whether they actually make a difference to clinical practice. In this paper we describe a novel evaluation framework - Impact-ED - developed at CeRC to fill the gap in impact evaluation research taking into account the community, content, services and technology dimensions of DLs. We present an account of Impact-ED's application in assessing the impact of the National Resource for Infection Control in the UK (NRIC www.nric.org.uk) - a real-world medical DL used by over 40 000 professionals monthly. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.