How to measure technology assessment: an introduction.

This contribution introduces the Technology Acceptance model. Since information systems are still underutilized, application of models of user acceptance can provide important clues about what can be done to increase system usage.

Assessing the prognoses on Health care in the information society 2013--thirteen years after.

Health care and information technology in health care is advancing at tremendous speed. We analysed whether the prognoses by Haux et al. - first presented in 2000 and published in 2002 - have been fulfilled in 2013 and which might be the reasons for match or mismatch. Twenty international experts in biomedical and health informatics met in May 2013 in a workshop to discuss match or mismatch of each of the 71 prognoses. After this meeting a web-based survey among workshop participants took place. Thirty-three prognoses were assessed matching; they reflect e.g. that there is good progress in storing patient data electronically in health care institutions. Twenty-three prognoses were assessed mismatching; they reflect e.g. that telemedicine and home monitoring as well as electronic exchange of patient data between institutions is not established as widespread as expected. Fifteen prognoses were assessed neither matching nor mismatching. ICT tools have considerably influenced health care in the last decade, but in many cases not as far as it was expected by Haux et al. in 2002. In most cases this is not a matter of the availability of technical solutions but of organizational and ethical issues. We need innovative and modern information system architectures which support multiple use of data for patient care as well as for research and reporting and which are able to integrate data from home monitoring into a patient centered health record. Since innovative technology is available the efficient and wide-spread use in health care has to be enabled by systematic information management.

Past and next 10 years of medical informatics.

More than 10 years ago Haux et al. tried to answer the question how health care provision will look like in the year 2013. A follow-up workshop was held in Braunschweig, Germany, for 2 days in May, 2013, with 20 invited international experts in biomedical and health informatics. Among other things it had the objectives to discuss the suggested goals and measures of 2002 and how priorities on MI research in this context should be set from the viewpoint of today. The goals from 2002 are now as up-to-date as they were then. The experts stated that the three goals: "patient-centred recording and use of medical data for cooperative care"; "process-integrated decision support through current medical knowledge" and "comprehensive use of patient data for research and health care reporting" have not been reached yet and are still relevant. A new goal for ICT in health care should be the support of patient centred personalized (individual) medicine. MI as an academic discipline carries out research concerning tools that support health care professionals in their work. This research should be carried out without the pressure that it should lead to systems that are immediately and directly accepted in practice.

Assessment of the IMIA educational accreditation process.

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) biomedical informatics educational recommendations of 2010 provided an excellent guide for institutions across the world in updating their curricula or establishing new programs. IMIA subsequently decided to offer an accreditation process, guided by the earlier recommendations, to assess existing educational programs in the field of biomedical informatics. This paper presents an overview and SWOT analysis of the accreditation process based on a two-year trial period at three sites across continents. Because other sites are now requesting similar accreditation visits by IMIA, the lessons learned by the committee that performed the assessments during trial period will provide useful guidance for both IMIA and those educational institutions.

Experiences with the development, implementation and evaluation of automated decision support systems.

A framework for the implementation of guidelines--GASTON--was developed. Its functions range from the definition of guidelines (using a GLIF like approach) to the implementation of a DSS that can be coupled to existing information systems. This paper discusses experiences with the development of three systems in different domains. It is concluded that the toolbox corresponding to the framework could be successfully used to develop these systems.

Enterprise resource planning for hospitals.

Integrated hospitals need a central planning and control system to plan patients' processes and the required capacity. Given the changes in healthcare one can ask the question what type of information systems can best support these healthcare delivery organizations. We focus in this review on the potential of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for healthcare delivery organizations. First ERP systems are explained. An overview is then presented of the characteristics of the planning process in hospital environments. Problems with ERP that are due to the special characteristics of healthcare are presented. The situations in which ERP can or cannot be used are discussed. It is suggested to divide hospitals in a part that is concerned only with deterministic processes and a part that is concerned with non-deterministic processes. ERP can be very useful for planning and controlling the deterministic processes.