Modification and Validation of a Maturity Assessment Tool for Public Health Information System Implementations in Sri Lanka.

Introduction: Maturity models assess the snapshot view of an organization and simultaneously guides the organization to advance on a road map towards ultimate levels of maturity. The health industry has recently embraced maturity models as a tool to improve the management of health information systems. Most electronic health information systems in Sri Lanka need assessment and monitoring and can benefit vastly by adopting maturity models. This study was conducted to modify and adopt a maturity model for public health institutions in Sri Lanka.

Methods: A review of the literature was done to identify a suitable model to measure the maturity of the public health information system implementations. A Modified Delphi study was then carried out with six experts to adapt the selected maturity tool, Public Health Information Technology (PHIT) maturity index, to the Sri Lankan context. Necessary modifications to the PHIT tool were done according to the comments gathered in the Modified Delphi rounds, and the validity of the tool was established. Finally, Key Informant Interviews were carried out with nine interviewees to qualitatively validate the instrument.

Results: The Public Health Information Technology maturity index developed by the University of Maryland, USA, was modified to suit the Sri Lankan context. Comments from the experts were accommodated during the initial rounds of the Modified Delphi study. It further derived the following values, indicating excellent content validity: I-CVI > 0.8 for 57 total items, S-CVI/Avg = 0.988, S-CVI/UA = 0.929 and Free-marginal kappa = 0.95.

Discussion And Conclusions: Modified and validated PHIT tool can be used to measure the maturity of public health institutions in similar contexts.