Evaluation methods to support health information systems development: A framework supported in literature and practical experience

Abstract

Given the diversity and complexity of the Health Information Systems (HIS), and taking into account the impact of this type of systems in the clinical performance and patient outcome, a rigorous evaluation process in the system development life cycle (SDLC) is extremely important. An effective evaluation during development not only promotes the quality of the final solution, but also ensures motivated users, error-free systems, and can even establish good practices to minimize costs in future developments. However, the HIS evaluation is a difficult process due to the complex nature of the health care domain, the objects being evaluated, as well as the comprehensiveness of the concept of the evaluation itself. The present work intends to explore, based on a literature review, the main methods of HIS evaluation to support the development, identifying in which stage of the SDLC these methods can be applied. Additionally, this work discusses the reasons for the evaluation of such systems, illustrating these issues with two real case studies of HIS implementations, in which some of the methods were successfully applied.