Handbook of Research on Advances in Health Informatics and Electronic Healthcare Applications: Global Adoption and Impact of Information Communication Technologies

Citation

Cullen, R. (2010), "Handbook of Research on Advances in Health Informatics and Electronic Healthcare Applications: Global Adoption and Impact of Information Communication Technologies", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 660-662. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011073061

This latest large volume from IGI Global claims to address a gap in the literature on the subject of global deployment, diffusion, adoption, use and impact of ICTs on the field of health informatics and electronic healthcare, by providing “a comprehensive resource, elucidating the adoption and usage of health informatics”. Billed on the IGI web site as a reference work, the volume claims to address this gap by providing “comprehensive coverage of topics”, and to bring together “an in‐depth collection of research articles and case studies from leading experts worldwide”. To make such claims opens up the publisher, and the editors of this particular work, to challenge on some of these key points. The editors themselves are not acknowledged experts in the field of health informatics, but rather mainstream IT/IS academics who have assumed they are therefore competent to evaluate contributions in this rather specialised and challenging field. They are, evidently, pleased with their efforts. The book's page on the IGI web sites carries a “review” by the leading editor, Khalil Khoumbati, reiterating these claims.

So how does this volume measure up? The volume is a compilation of 30 chapters, organised into five sections: “Health informatics and e‐health evaluation”; “Health informatics and e‐health tools and technologies”; “Health informatics and e‐health applications”; “Health informatics and e‐health impact”; and “Further reading”. Each chapter contains a set of definitions of key terms, to meet the claims that the volume is a reference text, and these form the basis of the extremely minimal index. The last section in the book, “Further reading”, could well be called Miscellaneous –rather than address more advanced topics, it appears to cover material that the editors could not place elsewhere, which tends to underline the fact that the volume was not designed as a systematic coverage of topics that should be addressed in a large expensive volume calling itself a “handbook”, but was rather the result of a call for contributions, sorted into some kind of coherence. Unfortunately, most of the sections are like this – the content of the volume does not fit easily into these five sections. Chapter 6, for example, the last chapter in the first section on Evaluation is titled “How can telemedicine benefit from broadband technologies?” It outlines changes in technology in the past two decades, and then briefly describes a number of trials of telemedicine interventions in the EU, concluding that “it is possible to provide very high quality and cost effective remote monitoring for home care applications with today's IP broadband technology”. The relevance to the section topic of evaluation presumably lies in the summary evaluations of a few projects (no methodology is given, and no peer‐reviewed references, so these are presumably subjective reports) amalgamated into an assumed model of the value of tele‐monitoring on discharge. Full of misspellings, garbled English, and supported by a smattering of non peer‐reviewed papers, this chapter is one of many that belie the claim that this book is a compendium of research articles by leading experts. On the other hand a more general chapter on the evaluation of health information systems, which could well have led off this section, is found in the final section, Further Reading. How do the editors account for this?

The muddle of topics goes on. In the second section, “E‐health tools and technologies”, the first chapter is on “Organisational factors and technological barriers as determinants for the intention to use wireless handheld technology in healthcare environment: an Indian case study” (a TAM study). The next is “A taxonomy of healthgrids in healthcare informatics”. The third, “Improving patient safety with health technology”, is a brief literature review of the use of information systems to avert adverse drug events, which focuses on error reduction but rarely mentions the technology used to do so. Section 4, “Health informatics and e‐health impact” contains no papers that appear to this reviewer to relate to that subtitle at all.

The main problems with the volume are: lack of editorial oversight of content, lack of structure in the volume, lack of quality control of individual chapters, and totally inadequate indexing. A significant proportion of the chapters are reports of individual initiatives without any strong evaluation component (“how we did it good” papers); others are narrowly focused research articles, which sit oddly beside them; some chapters are brief literature reviews, others are technical papers describing networks or architectures. There is nothing systematic about coverage of the main elements of health informatics, and little of the research covered is in any way advanced.

Within these constraints, the quality of the chapters is variable. While there are some useful chapters, many would not survive peer review for publications in a health informatics journal, let alone the mainstream medical literature. Topics appear to be covered randomly, and this leads to a lack of coherence throughout the volume. Given that the title Handbook of Research: Advances in … implies not only a systematic treatment of the field, but some cutting edge research, it is unfortunate that on both these counts the volume fails to deliver. In the field of medicine and the broader field of health studies, rigorous evidence to support decision‐making is the required standard, and any publication that does not set itself this standard has to be treated with suspicion. Like many IGI products this volume is substandard and overpriced. Only when libraries stop buying them will IGI address these issues.