A Collaborative Inter-Disciplinary Approach to the Evaluation of the Clinicians Health Channel.

The Clinicians Health Channel (CHC) is a web-site providing online access to current, accurate and reliable sources of information to help inform and assist clinicians in decision making, research and education. Resources include an electronic health library with citation databases and full text journals, links to other clinical reference materials, such as guidelines and protocols, and provision for discussion forums on clinical topics. An interdisciplinary, collaborative team from the University of Melbourne is undertaking an evaluation to determine how successfully the introduction of the CHC has met its original aims specifically in relation to the development, implementation and impact on changing behaviour and increasing usage of evidence based health care. A number of key research areas have been identified as important to the evaluation and development of the CHC. These identified research areas fall naturally into the three dimensions technical, social and behavioural of our conceptual framework for the evaluation of the CHC. This paper examines the progress on a three-year evaluation of the CHC. It examines the evaluation approach, methodology and insights obtained at the end of Stage 1 of the evaluation.