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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2021; 30(01): 056-060
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1726490
Special Section: Managing Pandemics with Health Informatics
Working Group Contributions

Managing Pandemic Responses with Health Informatics – Challenges for Assessing Digital Health Technologies

A Joint Position Paper from the IMIA Technology Assessment & Quality Development in Health Informatics Working Group and EFMI Working Group for Assessment of Health Information Systems
Farah Magrabi
1   Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
,
Elske Ammenwerth
2   UMIT, Private University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Institute of Medical Informatics, Hall in Tirol, Austria
,
Catherine K. Craven
3   Institute for Health Care Delivery Science, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA
,
Kathrin Cresswell
4   Usher Institute, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
,
Nicolet F. De Keizer
5   Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Department of Medical Informatics, Amsterdam Public Health research institute, The Netherlands
,
Stephanie K. Medlock
5   Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Department of Medical Informatics, Amsterdam Public Health research institute, The Netherlands
,
Philip J. Scott
6   University of Portsmouth, Centre for Healthcare Modelling and Informatics, Portsmouth, United Kingdom
,
Zoie Shui-Yee Wong
7   Graduate School of Public Health, St. Luke’s International University, Tokyo, Japan
,
Andrew Georgiou
1   Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
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Summary

Objectives: To highlight the role of technology assessment in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: An overview of existing research and evaluation approaches along with expert perspectives drawn from the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Working Group on Technology Assessment and Quality Development in Health Informatics and the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) Working Group for Assessment of Health Information Systems.

Results: Evaluation of digital health technologies for COVID-19 should be based on their technical maturity as well as the scale of implementation. For mature technologies like telehealth whose efficacy has been previously demonstrated, pragmatic, rapid evaluation using the complex systems paradigm which accounts for multiple sociotechnical factors, might be more suitable to examine their effectiveness and emerging safety concerns in new settings. New technologies, particularly those intended for use on a large scale such as digital contract tracing, will require assessment of their usability as well as performance prior to deployment, after which evaluation should shift to using a complex systems paradigm to examine the value of information provided. The success of a digital health technology is dependent on the value of information it provides relative to the sociotechnical context of the setting where it is implemented.

Conclusion: Commitment to evaluation using the evidence-based medicine and complex systems paradigms will be critical to ensuring safe and effective use of digital health technologies for COVID-19 and future pandemics. There is an inherent tension between evaluation and the imperative to urgently deploy solutions that needs to be negotiated.

Keywords

Health information technology - COVID-19 - evaluation studies - program evaluation


Publication History

Article published online:
21 April 2021

© 2021. IMIA and Thieme. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

 

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