Why Do Evaluations of eHealth Programs Fail? An Alternative Set of Guiding Principles

Why Do Evaluations of eHealth Programs Fail? An Alternative Set of Guiding Principles
Much has been written about why electronic health (eHealth) initiatives fail. Less attention has been paid to why evaluations of such initiatives fail to deliver the insights expected of them. PLoS Medicine has published three papers offering a "robust" and "scientific" approach to eHealth evaluation. One recommended systematically addressing each part of a "chain of reasoning", at the centre of which was the program's goals. Another proposed a quasi-experimental step-wedge design, in which late adopters of eHealth innovations serve as controls for early adopters. Interestingly, the authors of the empirical study flagged by these authors as an exemplary illustration of the step-wedge design subsequently abandoned it in favour of a largely qualitative case study because they found it impossible to establish anything approaching a controlled experiment in the study's complex, dynamic, and heavily politicised context.

The approach to evaluation presented in the previous PLoS Medicine series rests on a set of assumptions that philosophers of science call "positivist": that there is an external reality that can be objectively measured; that phenomena such as "project goals", "outcomes", and "formative feedback" can be precisely and unambiguously defined; that facts and values are clearly distinguishable; and that generalisable statements about the relationship between input and output variables are possible.

Read on-line: Why Do Evaluations of eHealth Programs Fail? An Alternative Set of Guiding Principles

Download from eHealthNews.eu Portal's mirror: Why Do Evaluations of eHealth Programs Fail? An Alternative Set of Guiding Principles (.pdf, 99 KB).

Citation: Greenhalgh T, Russell J (2010) Why Do Evaluations of eHealth Programs Fail? An Alternative Set of Guiding Principles. PLoS Med 7(11): e1000360. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000360

Copyright: © 2010 Greenhalgh, Russell. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Most Popular Now

Philips Foundation 2024 Annual Report: E…

Marking its tenth anniversary, Philips Foundation released its 2024 Annual Report, highlighting a year in which the Philips Foundation helped provide access to quality healthcare for 46.5 million people around...

New AI Transforms Radiology with Speed, …

A first-of-its-kind generative AI system, developed in-house at Northwestern Medicine, is revolutionizing radiology - boosting productivity, identifying life-threatening conditions in milliseconds and offering a breakthrough solution to the global radiologist...

Scientists Argue for More FDA Oversight …

An agile, transparent, and ethics-driven oversight system is needed for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to balance innovation with patient safety when it comes to artificial intelligence-driven medical...

New Research Finds Specific Learning Str…

If data used to train artificial intelligence models for medical applications, such as hospitals across the Greater Toronto Area, differs from the real-world data, it could lead to patient harm...

Giving Doctors an AI-Powered Head Start …

Detection of melanoma and a range of other skin diseases will be faster and more accurate with a new artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool that analyses multiple imaging types simultaneously...

AI Agents for Oncology

Clinical decision-making in oncology is challenging and requires the analysis of various data types - from medical imaging and genetic information to patient records and treatment guidelines. To effectively support...

Patients say "Yes..ish" to the…

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be integrated in healthcare, a new multinational study involving Aarhus University sheds light on how dental patients really feel about its growing role in...

Brains vs. Bytes: Study Compares Diagnos…

A University of Maine study compared how well artificial intelligence (AI) models and human clinicians handled complex or sensitive medical cases. The study published in the Journal of Health Organization...

'AI Scientist' Suggests Combin…

An 'AI scientist', working in collaboration with human scientists, has found that combinations of cheap and safe drugs - used to treat conditions such as high cholesterol and alcohol dependence...

Start-ups in the Spotlight at MEDICA 202…

17 - 20 November 2025, Düsseldorf, Germany. MEDICA, the leading international trade fair and platform for healthcare innovations, will once again confirm its position as the world's number one hotspot for...