last update : July 2012

Objectives:

• To foster interdisciplinary discussion on evaluation issues in health informatics.
• To support communication of experiences by organizing tutorials and workshops.
• To promote European networking on evaluation issues in health informatics.

Selection of members:
There is no formal membership. Interested persons are invited to participate to the workshops and other events of the WG. The European mailing list of the working group contains 261 members (February 2010).

Recent and Future Activities:

• The working group continues its close collaboration with the IMIA Working Group on Technology Assessment and Quality Development, mostly by joint publications and joint workshops and tutorials at international conferences.
• GEP-HI, the Guidelines for Good Evaluation Practice in Health Informatics, has been published by the International Journal of Medical Informatics: Nykänen P, Brender J, Talmon J, de Keizer N, Rigby M, Beuscart-Zephir MC, Ammenwerth E. Guideline for good evaluation practice in health informatics (GEP-HI). Int J Med Inform 2011; 80: 815-827
• Besides, the working group issued the following publications:
  • de Keizer NF, Talmon J, Ammenwerth E, Brender J, Rigby M, Nykänen P. Systematic Prioritization of the STARE-HI Reporting Items. An Application to Short Conference Papers on Health Informatics Evaluation. Methods Inf Med. 2011 Mar 4;50(3).
  • Rigby M, Ammenwerth E, Talmon J, Nykänen P, Brender J, de Keizer N. Health Informatics 3.0 and other Increasingly Dispersed Technologies Require Even Greater Trust: Promoting Safe Evidence-based Health Informatics. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2011. Stuttgart: Schattauer. 105-111.
  • M Rigby, J Brender, MC Beuscart-Zephir, H Hyppönen, P Nykänen, J Talmon, N de Keizer, E Ammenwerth, Next steps in evaluation and evidence? From generic to context-related. In: A Moen, SK Andersen, J Aarts and P Hurlen (eds.), User Centred Networked Health Care. Proccedings of MIE2011. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 169. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2011, 208-212.
• The working group is working on two elaboration papers for STARE-HI and GEP-HI that will give further explanations and justifications as well as examples.
• Members of the working group contributed to workshops at the International Conference on Integrated Care 2011 in Odense/DK.
• The working group organized the following activities at MIE2011 in Oslo:
  • a workshop on Minimum Dataset for monitoring eHealth implementations;
  • a panel on the Medical Device Directive;
  • a paper on “next steps in evaluation and evidence”;
  • a workshop on STARE-HI;
  • a business meeting to discuss future activities.
• The business meeting at MIE 2011 was well attended with around 30 participants and produced a list of planned actions and further potential future activities (the complete list of discussed activities is available on the web-site of the working group).
• As a follow-up of the business meeting at MIE, Jan Talmon gave a one day tutorial on writing for bioinformatics journals, including a presentation and discussion on STARE-HI, at the University of Münster for 15 PhD students from various places in Germany.
• At the moment, the working group is engaging in the following activities:
  • Organisation of a seminar on GEP-HI at STC2012 in Moscow.
  • Analysis of the Medical Device Directive and its implications for health IT evaluation.
  • Analysis of the usability standards mentioned in the Medical Device Directive.
  • The development of a methodology to develop indicators for national eHealth strategies and projects.
  • The preparation of a special issue in an international journal on the evaluation of CDSS systems in health care.
• The web-based Evaluation Inventory was completely updated and expanded.

  It now comprises around 1.500 abstracts of evaluation papers in health informatics and allows researchers from all over the world to submit papers for inclusions. The Evaluation Inventory database is available for free at http://evaldb.umit.at.

Chair:
Elske Ammenwerth,
UMIT - University for Health Sciences,
Medical Informatics and Technology,
6060 Hall in Tyrol,
Austria,
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Co-Chairs:
Pirkko Nykanen,
Faculty for Information Sciences,
Tampere University,
Finland,
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Jytte Brender,
Aalborg University,
Denmark,
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