Evaluation as a Field

The previous chapter should have succeeded in convincing the reader that evaluation in medical informatics, for all its potential benefits, is difficult in the real world. The informatics community can take some comfort in the fact that it is not alone. Evaluation is difficult in any field of endeavor. Fortunately, many good minds—representing an array of philosophical orientations, methodological perspectives, and domains of application—have explored ways to address these difficulties. Many of the resulting approaches to evaluation have met with substantial success. The resulting range of solutions, the field of evaluation itself, is the focus of this chapter.