Evaluating educational interventions for health professions in the digital age

As we saw in the previous chapters, various educational interventions have been designed and implemented to prepare health care professionals to practice in the information and Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-rich environment of the twenty-first century. However, for interventions to be effective there is a need for more evidence: we need to know what interventions work best, for what, for whom, and under which conditions. Evaluation is critical for providing this evidence. In this chapter, we will discuss the evaluation of educational interventions in general and of interventions related to challenges of the digital era in particular. We start by defining evaluation and discussing the relationship between evaluation and research, Then, we will describe the three intervention types (simple, complicated, and complex), and the different implications of each. Next, the five attributes of evaluation (reliability, validity, feasibility, acceptability, and educational impact) will be introduced, and the various levels of evaluation discussed with an emphasis on the need to consider cost-effectiveness and the process that learners go through. Subsequently, we will highlight the challenges involved in evaluating educational interventions in general and the specific issues pertaining to informatics-related interventions. Finally, we will use case studies from our own and other's research to illustrate these issues.