Dr. Bryant Karras is the Principal Investigator on the project An Evaluation Framework for eHealth Survey Applications housed at the University of Washington’s Clinical Informatics Research Group. This interdisciplinary research group is in the department of Health Services and the department of Medical Education and Medical Informatics, in both the Schools of Public Health and Medicine.

What is unique and/or innovative about your study?
We’ve built on the work of Dr. Don Dillman, the Rand Corporation and other thought leaders in the area of survey methods to create a new ontology for comparing and analyzing survey systems. This ontology is designed to serve as a tool for comparing and evaluating the features of various electronic survey systems and tools used in and by healthcare organizations. An ontology is an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them (ref:Dictionary.com). Our goal is to create a tool that is easily understood by executives in health care and would help them select the most effective eHealthSurvey system for their needs.

How is your project progressing so far?
We have experienced a few minor delays, but are essentially on schedule with our original project plan. We hope to have an update in October.

What prompted you to explore this research?
The desire to advance the state of electronic survey technologies – i.e., to improve the overall quality and range of electronic survey tools and technologies available for use by health services organizations.

Ultimately we aim to contribute to the development and widespread adoption of standards for representation of electronic survey question types and electronic survey delivery systems used to author and administer them. Ideally this will also drive the development of more robust and market-relevant electronic survey products by IT vendors for the healthcare industry.

How would a typical end-user utilize the final product/results of your research?
Our primary goal is to educate key technology acquisition decision makers within healthcare organizations about what’s available and what’s possible to achieve with electronic survey technologies.

By using our ontology to map their specific needs or “functional requirements” to specific attributes or “feature sets” of a given electronic survey product or system, these organizational leaders will be better equipped to make more informed decisions about technology purchases and/or technology development initiatives.

We also hope that the ontology can be a tool to help educate domain experts about capabilities of current survey systems and possible future systems and technologies. It could aid them in creating better surveys and survey questions to be implemented digitally and using capabilities unique to online survey systems to enhance their survey use.

What are the greatest challenges in eHealth and more specifically, your project?
Change is inevitable, what is novel “today” will become standard or obsolete by “tomorrow”. This is a challenge especially with eHealth that must utilize rapidly changing technology. The challenge is to develop this ontology in a way that is timely and also predictive so it is relevant for future use.

In what ways would you like to see eHealth evolve?
We would like clinical providers and health care professionals to be more informed about how technology can help them better assist their clients. We would also like to see clinical providers understand how technology could be used in addition to current methods to improve care and that it can be used to help them do their jobs more effectively and increase the quality of health care for their clients.

How do you stay informed of advances and innovations in eHealth?
Involvement in national organizations like American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) helps us stay current with what is happening in informatics academic research. Our team also learned much about what drives the business of eHealth by attending the eHealth Summit last year.

Bryant, many thanks for your informative update.

Dr. Patricia Franklin from the University of Massachusetts will check-in with us in our August edition of Meet the Grantees.