Handbook of Evaluation Methods for Health Informatics

catch phrase from the 1996 film Jerry Maguire. All of us want to see evidence as to whether something is worth investing in or not. I remember one public health informatician who was my boss at the time of my post-doc fellowship telling the fellows: “If you figure out how to evaluate health information technology (HIT) well enough, you’ll never have to worry about your career in the future.” At the time I had to wonder if that could be true. Even now, I certainly do not know. My boss probably said so because we are living in an outcomeoriented world and we expect that the evaluation of HIT will be able to demonstrate how well HIT works in order to justify the investment of money, time, and resources. Hence, knowledge and skill in the field of HIT evaluation is one competency that a health informatician must have. Evaluation has been considered a difficult task owing to the complexity of the environment in which information systems are implemented and the busy schedule related to working with patients, especially in a hospital setting [1]. On top of that, we often need to know the baseline data, in order to compare it with the results after the deployment of a new HIT system for evaluation. This requires thoughtful planning ahead; if not, it is often too late to perform evaluation once the IT system is implemented. HIT evaluation is defined as “the act of measuring or assessing the properties of a health information system (in terms of planning, development, implementation, or operation), the result of which informs a decision to be made concerning that system in a specific context” [2]. As the title, Handbook of Evaluation Methods for Health Informatics, suggests, this is not a textbook but a reference book [3]. Handbooks are usually designed to be easily consulted and to provide quick answers in a certain field [4]. The author claimed the purpose of this book was to illusHandbook of Evaluation Methods for Health Informatics