Metrics for eHealth services improvement

Abstract

Identification of appropriate performance measures in healthcare is fundamental for judging quality of service in any healthcare organisation. However, the dynamic nature of the healthcare context and complexity of stakeholder requirements have resulted in many difficulties in deciding appropriateness of performance factors to measure outcomes. Yet another facet that hinders achievement of successful performance measuring approaches is the unavailability of systematic guidance to identify the relationship between different types of performance measures. Further, it is important to analyse this relationship by using existing electronic data sets which will ensure the data quality in determining the healthcare service quality. This is an ongoing research attempting to establish a Return on Investment (ROI) model that could facilitate performance measurement of eHealth service deployment while overcoming the aforementioned deficiencies. The systematic guidance of deciding key performance factors considering different healthcare value perspectives in order to establish ROI metrics for the healthcare context, specifically in ICU clinical settings, have been introduced in this paper. It can be served as a theoretical basis in ensuring data quality in eHealth data sources. The advantage of the proposed guidance is in extracting appropriate key performance indicators for measuring outcomes of ICU clinical settings in terms of available process indicators while the relevant data for these indicators could be retrieved from the data warehouse.