Craig Kuziemsky Presented a Study on Unintended Benefits of Health Information Systems

Craig Kuziemsky tackled the unintended benefits of introducing health information systems (HIS) at the European Medical Informatics Conference in Pisa, Italy on Aug. 27. Professor Kuziemsky and a team of researchers from Canada, Denmark, and Australia used several case studies of HIS implementation to develop a model of unintended benefits of HIS usage with three categories of benefits: patient, service delivery and administrative. They also examined the implications of these benefits on the design and evaluation of HISs. The benefits were not visible until after these systems were used in real clinical situations and settings. This was in contrast to studies of negative consequences of HIS implementation, which are often easier to identify because they raise issues which tend to draw immediate attention.