Discovering how to think about a hospital patient information system by struggling to evaluate it: a committee's journal.
Parallel to the monumental problem of replacing paper-and-pen-based patient information management systems with electronic ones is the problem of evaluating the extent to which the change represents an improvement. All clinicians must grapple with this daunting challenge; those with little or no informatics expertise may be particularly surprised by the attendant difficulties. To do so successfully, they must be able to explicitly conceptualize the daily clinical work-a prerequisite for appreciating and reasonably evaluating it. Further, few of these evaluators may have reflected on the dynamic interaction between their work and their tools-how changing a tool necessarily changes the work. This article illuminates these problems by telling the story of how one patient care information systems committee first learned to think about the purpose of a patient information management system, and second, how to evaluate the impact of its implementation.
Schulman
Joseph
J
Department of Pediatrics, Division of Newborn Medicine, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, 525 East 68th Street, Box 106, New York, NY 10065, USA. jos2039@med.cornell.edu
Kuperman
Gilad J
GJ
Kharbanda
Anupam
A
Kaushal
Rainu
R
D026683:Advisory Committees; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D009937:Organizational Objectives