Reporting qualitative research in health informatics: REQ-HI recommendations.

To develop a set of recommendations for authors of qualitative studies in the field of health informatics, we conducted an extensive literature search and also manually checked major journals in the field of biomedical informatics and qualitative research looking for papers, checklists, and guidelines pertaining to assessing and reporting of qualitative studies. We synthesized the found criteria to develop an initial set of reporting recommendations that are particularly relevant to qualitative studies of health information technology systems. This paper presents a preliminary version of these recommendations. We are planning to refine and revise this version using comments and suggestions of experts in evaluation of health informatics applications and publish a detailed set of recommendations.