InfoFlow Framework for Evaluating Information Flow and New Health Care Technologies

This article presents a framework of 6 distinct yet interrelated factors for describing information flow that arose from a combination of field studies in a hospital ward and a review of literature. These studies investigated the dynamics of nurses' information flow, focusing on shift change. The InfoFlow Framework's 6 interrelated factors that affect the information flow are information, personnel, artifacts, spatiality, temporality, and communication mode. The framework is presented as a tool for evaluating new health care technologies. The 6 factors and their interrelationships are described first. Next, this structure is applied as a tool to aid in the analysis of the data generated in a study that assesses technology in use. Then the use of the framework is illustrated by structuring it as a set of questions that can be used as a guide for other researchers to generate coherent descriptions of the information flow and to evaluate technology deployments. Finally, there is a discussion of areas where the InfoFlow framework may be applied to allow an evaluation of the extent to which the framework may be generalized to other settings.