Bell Eapen MD, PhD.

One of the most promising trends in Health Information Technology (HIT) is Health Information Exchange (HIE). Several HIE initiatives are jostling for space in the HIT arena in many areas. Like most other public HIT projects, funding depends on benefits evaluation. Benefits evaluation could be a difficult undertaking requiring careful planning even for an Electronic Health Records system.

Image credit USDA @ Flikr (Image altered and text added)

The goal of HIE is to facilitate access to and retrieval of clinical data to provide safer, timely, efficient, effective, and equitable patient-centered care. All the goals are subjective open to varied interpretations, making benefits evaluation in HIE, a nightmare.

Canada Health Infoway (CHI) published a benefits evaluation indicator technical report in 2006, that was upgraded to a new version in 2012. After comprehensive search and literature evaluation CHI has proposed the various parameters that are important under various scenarios with a broad focus.

HIEBR is an attempt at creating a simple tool based on the CHI report for evaluating HIE benefits from a user perspective. The focus is on simplicity and HIEBR is not claimed to be a comprehensive HIE benefits evaluation tool. The questionnaire has 10 Likert scale questions that have to be scored from 0-4 giving you a score ranging from 0-40. This is multiplied by 2.5 to represent this on a more user-friendly scale of 100. However, it should be noted that HIEBR score does not represent a percentage. The main purpose of HIEBR is to assess the impact of an HIE initiative. So it is designed to be administered pre and post HIE implementation and compared using non-parametric statistical tools.

SUSie is another tool that combines System Usability Scale with basic benefits realization questions incorporated, retaining the SUS style. Please cite this page as below, add your study reference in our wiki page, and share this page if you use this tool.

Click here to download a PDF copy of HIEBR