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This article discusses eHealth evaluation leadership in terms of the need, key characteristics, and means to cultivate this leadership. It is well known that health leaders with technical informatics skills and prior eHealth adoption experience are more likely to commit to a long-term eHealth vision, are highly motivated, and can navigate through complex adoption issues. However, much less attention is paid to leadership when it comes to electronic health evaluation. The aim here is to engage the eHealth and broader health leadership communities in a dialogue about eHealth evaluation leadership in terms of its importance, the issues involved, and ways to build capacity in Canada and abroad.

OBJECTIVE: To identify studies involving information technology (IT) in medication reconciliation (MedRec) and determine how IT is used to facilitate the MedRec process. DATA SOURCES: The search strategy included a database search of MEDLINE and Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), hand-searching of collected material, and references from articles retrieved. The database search was limited to English-language papers. MEDLINE includes publications dating back to 1950 and CINAHL includes those dating back to 1982. The search included articles in both databases up to March 2009. Boolean queries were constructed using combinations of search terms for medication reconciliation, IT, and electronic records. STUDY SELECTION AND DATA EXTRACTION: Three inclusion criteria were used. The study had to (1) involve the MedRec process, (2) be a primary study, and (3) involve the use of IT. Selection was performed by 2 reviewers through consensus. Data related to study characteristics, focus, and IT use were extracted. DATA SYNTHESIS: The included studies described a range of IT used throughout the MedRec process, from basic email and databases to specialized MedRec tools. A generic MedRec workflow was created and types of IT found in the studies were mapped to the workflow activities as well as to a set of functionalities based on the Institute of Medicine's Key Capabilities of an Electronic Health Record System. In the studies reviewed, IT was mainly used to obtain medication information. Although there were only a few MedRec tools in the studies, those that did exist supported the central activities for MedRec: comparison of medications and clarification of discrepancies. CONCLUSIONS: MedRec is an important process to ensure patient medication safety. Evidence was found that IT can and has been used to facilitate some MedRec activities and new applications are being developed to support the entire MedRec process.

This paper aims to reconcile the use of Palliative Performance Scale (PPSv2) for survival prediction in palliative care through an international collaborative study by five research groups. The study involves an individual patient data meta-analysis on 1,808 patients from four original datasets to reanalyze their survival patterns by age, gender, cancer status, and initial PPS score. Our findings reveal a strong association between PPS and survival across the four datasets. The Kaplan-Meier survival curves show each PPS level as distinct, with a strong ordering effect in which higher PPS levels are associated with increased length of survival. Using a stratified Cox proportional hazard model to adjust for study differences, we found females lived significantly longer than males, with a further decrease in hazard for females not diagnosed with cancer. Further work is needed to refine the reporting of survival times/probabilities and to improve prediction accuracy with the inclusion of other variables in the models.

This is a review paper on best practices in information management for health ministries in governments. It is based on a recent study in which we examined information management (IM) and information technology (IT) functions inside a provincial health ministry. In order to foster best IM practices we offer five key guiding principles followed by five recommendations for action. We urge governments to consider these principles and recommendations when planning the IM function for their health ministries.