Multi-Dimensional Criteria in Evaluating E-Health Services
The most efficient e-health evaluation framework is based on several criteria. They serve as tools to enable the development of successful e-health initiatives because they assist the healthcare organization in identifying and thus addressing multiple areas of concern.
In order to reveal the full value of e-health initiatives, which are dictated by complex regulations, a certain criterion has to be selected when analyzing a specific e-health service. The group of criteria employed in the evaluation of the mentioned field is divided into three classes depending on the technical dimension, the economic dimension, holdem rules and the social dimension. Hence the three categories of criteria are: usability, direct costs and benefits and trust.
- The set of usability criteria – it represents perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness; the first is defined as the degree to which an individual considers using a particular system is free of effort, whereas the latter refers to the degree to which one thinks that resorting to a particular system enhances one’s performance. In order to assess the extent of usability the following notions have to be taken into consideration: accessibility, compatibility, functionality, user’s satisfaction, user interface. All these represent assets of the usability principle. In the field of e-health services, these notions are applied to the technologies used by the healthcare system.
- Criteria of costs and benefits – the cost-benefit analysis is based on the concept of relative advantage, which denominates the degree to which an innovation is considered to be superior to its predecessor. Some specialists criticized this set of criteria as being limited because they target only direct tangible costs and benefits and are based only on accounting and financial instruments. Applied to the e-health services, these standards evaluate the efficiency of e-commerce with products and services provided by the earlier mentioned domain.
- The trust criteria – seen as a crucial property of information systems that offer e-services, trust can be defined as the willingness of an individual or group to be vulnerable to the actions of a party based on the expectation that the latter will perform a certain action important for the former, regardless of the ability to monitor and control the trustee. Applied to e-health, the trust criteria is tightly related to the security and confidentiality of medical data.
The usability criteria is associated with the technological dimension, the criteria of costs and benefits corresponds to the economic dimension, whereas the trust criteria is related to the social play free casino dimension.