Objectives of the service
The holistic goal of this GSP study is the development and validation of a comprehensive methodology to evaluate outcomes and impacts generated by ESA-sponsored projects related to the provision of sustainable telemedicine services. The ultimate goal is to provide clear, relevant and impartial information to be used for evidence-based decision making concerning the migration of pilot services into real, operational undertakings.
Current Status
ASSIST has been closed after successfully achieving its goals. To support project leaders and entrepreneurs practically, the project has created a self-assessment tool that reflects the methodological requirements of the assessment framework. The ASSIST assessment framework utilised the existing experience in the socio-economic evaluation of telemedicine and eHealth by an in-depth analysis of 16 assessment frameworks and study team's own experience in evaluating more than 50 projects.
The ASSIST assessment framework builds on Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). ASSIST has defined 30 stereotypes of stakeholders that are meaningful to telemedicine services. Each stakeholder has its own set of pre-defined indicators covering the most important impacts occurring in telemedicine.
In total ASSIST has defined 339 indicators for its 30 stakeholders. ASSIST calculates several performance measures. They help users identify affordability aspects, financial risks, and points of highest impact. A validation with four telemedicine projects showed that that it can be very beneficial to projects but still the first effort in learning to handle the tool could be reduced.
ASSIST is available for free und a GPL licence from its project website. Future telemedicine projects sponsored by ESA will be encouraged to use the ASSIST tool.
