Vital Signs

Joint Application Development, or JAD, is a method in which users and designers work together in structured workshops to settle what a system must do before it is built. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary entry and the roles in a JAD session, then looks at how three health IT projects, a nursing information system, an epilepsy patient portal, and a research survey tool, used JAD sessions, and what the evidence does not show.

A needs assessment is an organized way to find out what is required to reach a goal, beginning with a gap analysis of the current and desired states. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five 2026 studies: a breast cancer chemotherapy platform built from a needs assessment, a chatbot for postpartum mothers with opioid use disorder based on 12 patient and 11 provider interviews, a generative AI chatbot designed after surveying 511 psychiatric outpatients, an ICU palliative care review, and a clerkship assessment of 42 students.

A simulation exercise is a staged, realistic trial of how people and systems perform. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five studies: a Heidelberg mass casualty exercise with 91 simulated casualties and geotracking that found triage accuracy of 75.4 percent, an interviews study of ambulance nurses trained on intimate partner violence, a 12-student bladder ultrasound simulation, a Canadian military trauma simulation with 21 providers, and a multinational trauma exercise that used virtual patients.

Unit testing is the practice of checking each of an application’s smallest testable pieces, called units, by itself to confirm it works. Tests are often automated, though manual testing is possible. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: FDA guidance on software validation, the HL7 FHIR testing framework, a test-driven development project that reached 78 percent code coverage with 875 custom tests, an automated testing framework for biomedical pipelines, and a proposal for clinical testing harnesses for agentic AI.

Integration testing is a testing event that looks for errors in the interactions and interfaces among software components when they are combined into larger parts of a system. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and where integration testing sits among unit, system, and acceptance testing, then reviews five sources: FDA software validation guidance, the HL7 FHIR testing framework, a survey of conformance testing in Finland, a DICOM connectathon with 32 implementers, and the IHE connectathon model for digital pathology.

Stress testing is a type of performance testing that checks an application’s robustness, availability, and reliability under extreme conditions such as heavy loads, high concurrency, or limited computing resources. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how it differs from other test types, then reviews four sources: FDA guidance on software validation, the HIPAA contingency plan testing requirement, a benchmark of FHIR analytics queries on up to 71 million resources, and a scalable clinical data warehouse designed for 19 million daily records.

Smoke testing is a short series of test cases run before more rigorous testing to confirm that an application’s main features work. It can be automated, manual, or both. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and where smoke tests fit among other kinds of testing, then reviews four sources: a smoke testing method for distributed analytics, automated acceptance testing of clinical decision support in an EHR, an automated validation tool for clinical study metadata, and the FDA’s guidance on software validation.

Validation is the process of demonstrating that a system meets its specifications and that requirements for a specific intended use have been fulfilled. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the difference between verification and validation, then reviews four sources: the FDA’s guidance on software validation, a statistical approach to validating legacy data during an EHR conversion, a data validation study of NICU parental presence documentation, and an optimal validation sampling strategy for a multinational HIV study.

FMEA, or Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, is a systematic, proactive method for examining a process to find where and how it might fail and which failures matter most. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and scoring by severity, occurrence, and detection, then reviews five sources: an in-hospital medication process analysis with 101 failure modes, a critical radiology result project, a systematic review in adaptive radiotherapy, a blood gas template, and a pharmacy drug management pilot.

System testing is the phase of software testing in which a complete, integrated system is tested against its specified requirements as a black box. This post explains how it differs from unit, integration, and acceptance testing, and reviews three kinds of evidence on testing EHR safety: the SAFER Guides and the finding that eight organizations fully implemented only 18 percent of 140 recommendations, the 2025 revision of the Guides, and a study of 1,183 hospitals tested with simulated orders and patients.

A chief information officer, or CIO, is the executive responsible for the people, processes, and technology of an organization’s IT function so that they deliver outcomes that support its goals. This post explains how the CIO differs from clinical informatics roles such as the CCIO, CMIO, CNIO, and CRIO, what a study of 142 hospital CIOs found about innovation capability, what an AMIA task force concluded about clinical informatics officers, and what studies of nursing informatics officer roles in Canada and military facilities found.

Cost-benefit analysis, or CBA, is a process for estimating the costs and benefits of a project or investment to judge whether it is worthwhile. This post explains the steps, including discounting and sensitivity analysis, what a longitudinal study of Dutch hospitals found about digital maturity and financial performance, and how nurses and informaticists contribute to credible business cases.

Acceptance testing is a user-run test event that demonstrates whether an application meets business objectives and system requirements. This post explains how it differs from unit, integration, and system testing, what a national study of CPOE safety tests and a study of SAFER Guide adherence found, and how nurses can make acceptance testing realistic before go-live.

The Hype Cycle is a five-stage model of how visible and how inflated expectations become as an emerging technology matures. This post explains the stages, how researchers have used the model for telehealth, radiology, and endoscopy AI, what the model cannot do, and how nurses and informaticists can judge new technology without being swept up in the hype.

Scrum is an iterative and incremental framework mainly used in agile software development. This post explains Scrum’s roles, events, and artifacts from the Scrum Guide, how health IT teams have used sprints to optimize the EHR and build clinical tools, and how nurses and informaticists can take part effectively.

A Gantt chart is a bar chart that shows planned work against time, usually with the people responsible for each activity. This post explains how to read one, how health IT and clinical quality teams have used them, where a chart alone falls short, and how nurses and informaticists can keep a schedule honest.

Requirements are the needs, functions, and constraints that a software implementation or specification must satisfy. This post explains functional versus non-functional requirements, how to elicit them from clinicians, what makes a requirement testable, how traceability connects them to testing and go-live, and what research says about user-centered requirements work in health care.

Knowledge management is the practice of creating, sharing, using, and managing an organization’s knowledge and information. This post explains tacit and explicit knowledge, how knowledge management supports clinical decision support content, training, and learning health systems, research on nurses and knowledge management, and practical roles for nurses and informaticists.

A vendor is a company that provides products or services. In healthcare IT, vendors supply EHRs, devices, cloud services, and support. This post explains what vendors do, what research says about EHR vendor performance, contract and transparency issues, third-party security risk, and how nurses and informaticists work with vendors during implementation.

Gap analysis compares an organization’s current state with a desired future state to identify the differences and the actions needed to close them. This post explains how gap analysis works, its uses in EHR selection and implementation, workflow redesign, cybersecurity and compliance programs, and maturity assessments, common pitfalls, and the role nurses play.