Abstract
Assessment processes are essential to guarantee quality and continuous improvement of software in healthcare, as they measure software attributes in their lifecycle, verify the degree of alignment between the software and its objectives and identify unpredicted events. This article analyses the use of an assessment model based on software metrics for three healthcare information systems from a public hospital that provides secondary and tertiary care in the region of Ribeirao Preto. Compliance with the metrics was investigated using questionnaires in guided interviews of the system analysts responsible for the applications. The outcomes indicate that most of the procedures specified in the model can be adopted to assess the systems that serves the organization, particularly in the attributes of compatibility, reliability, safety, portability and usability.
Highlights
The global health observatory data repository, from the WHO, with information about healthcare investments in over 190 countries, shows a rising curve of expenses per capita in health (WHO,2013)
Investments in information systems can constitute part of the healthcare organization policies to reduce the tension between costs and budgets, in order to improve efficiency and quality in the processes that occur in this sector
The work done was qualitative and it was divided into a first conceptual phase, with the specification of inspection procedures for the model used and a second empirical phase, with the investigation of compliance to the metrics obtained in the first phase for three applications in a public hospital offering regional medium and high complexity services
Summary
The global health observatory data repository, from the WHO, with information about healthcare investments in over 190 countries, shows a rising curve of expenses per capita in health (WHO,2013). The development and maintenance of healthcare information systems are complex activities, due to: (a) lack of standardization and interoperability difficulties between applications (Hillestad et al.,2006), (b) the interdisciplinary characteristic of healthcare that demands added knowledge from several user professionals in the construction of information systems (Fichman, Kohli& Krishnan, 2011; Carvalho&Eduardo, 1998) and (c) the fragmented nature of the healthcare sector and the difficulties to systematize processes in applications (Abouzahr&Boerma, 2005), besides the actual change in paradigm, of a reactive model, centered on the disease, to a preventive model, that makes communication flow difficult among the three levels of attention and in continuous attention (OPAS, 2011) Within this context of complexity, assessment is an essential activity to guarantee healthcare software quality as well as its continuous enhancement.
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