Pirkko Nykänen

Health IT evaluation studies have often been found to be of limited quality. To address this problem, several guidelines and frameworks have been developed as tools to support improvement of the quality of evaluation studies. In this contribution, we review available guidelines and then present the Good Evaluation Practice Guideline in Health Informatics (GEP-HI) in more detail. GEP-HI is a comprehensive guideline which supports especially planning and execution of a health IT evaluation study. The GEP-HI guideline helps to overcome the quality problems related to weak study planning and methodological study design. We also discuss application of GEP-HI on an evaluation project and discuss the need to publish systematically following the recognised publication guidelines. Finally we discuss the future trend on multi-method evaluation approaches.

Modern eHealth, ubiquitous health and personal wellness systems take place in an unsecure and ubiquitous information space where no predefined trust occurs. This paper presents novel information model and an architecture for trust based privacy management of personal health and wellness information in ubiquitous environment. The architecture enables a person to calculate a dynamic and context-aware trust value for each service provider, and using it to design personal privacy policies for trustworthy use of health and wellness services. For trust calculation a novel set of measurable context-aware and health information-sensitive attributes is developed. The architecture enables a person to manage his or her privacy in ubiquitous environment by formulating context-aware and service provider specific policies. Focus groups and information modelling was used for developing a wellness information model. System analysis method based on sequential steps that enable to combine results of analysis of privacy and trust concerns and the selection of trust and privacy services was used for development of the information system architecture. Its services (e.g. trust calculation, decision support, policy management and policy binding services) and developed attributes enable a person to define situation-aware policies that regulate the way his or her wellness and health information is processed.

A feasibility analysis has been performed to study the applicability of privacy attributes with a developed wellness information model. Information privacy concerns specifically access to individually identifiable personal information and one's ability to control information about oneself. We carried out a user scenario walk-through of the privacy attributes related to the wellness components. The walk-through showed a need to relate self-regulating privacy policies to the pervasive context so that during various trust-building processes, a person is aware and can control the use, disclosure and even secondary use of his personal, private wellness information.

A feasibility analysis has been performed to study the applicability of privacy attributes with a developed wellness information model. Information privacy concerns specifically access to individually identifiable personal information and one's ability to control information about oneself. We carried out a user scenario walk-through of the privacy attributes related to the wellness components. The walk-through showed a need to relate self-regulating privacy policies to the pervasive context so that during various trust-building processes, a person is aware and can control the use, disclosure and even secondary use of his personal, private wellness information.

A Good evaluation practice in Health Informatics (GEP-HI) Evaluation Practice guideline has been developed through a consensus making process. The guideline lists a set of 60 issues that are relevant for planning, implementation and execution of an evaluation study in the health informatics domain. These issues cover the phases of an evaluation study: Study exploration, first study design, operationalization of methods, detailed study design, execution and finalization of an evaluation study. In this seminar we walk through a case study to present how to plan a health information system evaluation study applying the good evaluation practice guideline.

The Evaluation Roadmap: 10.4018/978-1-59140-423-1.ch018: (Extracted from Ammenwerth. E., Brender, J., Nykänen, P., Prokosch, H., Rigby, M., & Talmon, J. [2004]). Visions and strategies to improve evaluation of

Information technologies (IT) are widely used in healthcare, however, little is known about the usability of nursing information systems. This article reports an evaluation study that aimed at researching the usability of four electronic nursing record (ENR) systems and thereby providing guidelines for further IT development. For the purposes of the study the concept of usability was defined to cover the following aspects: nurse-computer interaction in working context, information exchange, and collaboration between healthcare professionals. The study utilized two usability research methods, contextual inquiry and expert review, and was conducted with 18 nurses in Finland. Study results showed that the ENR systems share several usability problems in common, most of them relating to the efficiency of use, intuitiveness, and poor fit for multi-professional needs. Nurses had mainly negative experiences on documenting practices with ENRs: documentation requires a lot of resources, patient information is hard to find, and procedures do not meet the contextual needs. These findings suggest usability problems having significant effects on nurses' documentation practices and nursing work.