Adapting the STARE-HI Guidelines for the Evaluation of Home Care Telehealth Applications: An Interpretive Approach

An important issue in the advancement and deployment of home care telematic services is their assessment, especially with the goal of improving such services and making them easier to integrate into the social and clinical setting. The meaning that researchers apply to assistive environments and telehealth in general, (i.e. a medical innovation or a drug that can be prescribed to patients or an information system primarily serving information transmission and processing needs), is critical to the method they select for evaluation. In our opinion home telehealth has characteristics of an assistive environment and is best evaluated using an interpretive approach. In this paper we propose an adapted framework for evaluating home telehealth interventions and describe how the Statement on the Reporting of Evaluation Studies in Health Informatics (STARE-HI) guidelines can be adapted to home care telematics.