Researching Health Communication Technology Intervention Projects: The Challenge of Achieving Utilization Levels Sufficient for Evaluation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The deployment of interactive communication technologies to deliver health services and education has grown significantly over the past decade. Telemedicine, the use of telecommunication technologies for health care, is one specific application that has enjoyed significant public and private funding for research projects. However, telemedicine project evaluators have run into a serious barrier in their research efforts, namely, the deployment of telemedicine is often tremendously time-consuming and often yields utilization levels inadequate for research purposes. This article seeks to overview this problem through a case analysis of a multidimensional telemedicine project in Michigan that enjoyed both success and failure. The article concludes with a discussion of five universal challenges that must be addressed for project evaluators to achieve utilization levels to allow for reliable research conclusions.