The e-Health Implementation Toolkit is the product of the two-year research project, funded by the Service Delivery and Organization (SDO) stream of the National Institute for Health Research in the U.K, to identify the barriers and facilitators to implementation of e-health initiatives within the National Health Service. The e-HIT is intended to act as a sensitising tool – to help senior managers in their thinking and planning for an e-Health implementation in considering potential problems that will likely be faced and to help facilitate thinking about how they can be overcome or avoided. The toolkit is downloadable from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pcph/research/ehealth/documents/e-HIT.xls. It covers consideration of Context (including organisational factors, national and local policies, and other drivers of the implementation); Intervention (the impact on professional – patient interactions, inter-professional relationships, and the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the intervention); and Workforce (the impact of the intervention on workload, workflow, distribution of work between different user groups, the need for education and training, and the impact on relationships between professional groups). Reports are generated based on responses to items listed within the toolkit.

The development and formative evaluation of the e-Health Implemention toolkit is described in a paper, published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2010, 10:61, available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6947-10-61.pdf.