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Evaluating health information systems is an integral part of the life cycle and development of information systems as it can improve the quality of health care. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a bilingual Web-based repository of health-related software products evaluation tools.

The present paper is an applied-developmental study that includes the stages of analysis, design, implementation and evaluation procedures. By searching valid databases as well as holding focus group meetings with a group of experts, the necessary elements for designing a Web-based repository were identified, and also unified modelling language diagrams were designed by using a visual paradigm. The coding(programming) was conducted based on the Gantlet Web Systems Development Framework at the next stage. Finally, after implementing and testing the system, the content was added to the repository, and then the repository was evaluated in terms of usability testing.

The health informatics evaluation tools (HIET) repository provides a functional and selective environment that facilitates the sharing, online storage and retrieval of assessment tools by the scientific community. The HIET repository is easily accessible at www.hiet.ir/ The website is implemented in structured query language (MySQL), personal homepage. Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) and Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LEMP) and supports all major browsers.

The HIET repository, as mentioned earlier, serves as an application environment for sharing, storing and online retrieving the assessment tools of health information systems. Therefore, this tool not only facilitates the search, retrieving and study of many evaluation-related papers, which are time-consuming and stressful for researchers and students but can lead to a faster and more scientific evaluation of information systems.

One of the great strides to develop a health information system is to define the requirements of the systems. This paper aims to identify and collect the requirements for designing a Web-based repository of evaluation tools for health-related software products.

The current qualitative-review study is conducted in four phases including searching databases, reviewing websites and similar repositories, holding focus group discussions with a group of experts and determining the essential requirements for designing a Web-based repository, and also drawing the unified modeling language diagrams using Visual Paradigm software for displaying the necessities which were gathered.

The requirements for designing a Web-based repository are provided in five main categories: technical, structural, content, legal and others. In general, creating a repository takes considerable time and effort, as well as going through the steps of the system’s life cycle.

In this study, the first and the most significant step is creating an developing a reasonable system identifying the system requirements, which is successfully conducted. The requirements given in this study will be used in the next steps, which make use of programming languages such as PHP and HTML, so as to design a Web-based repository for health product software evaluation tools.

Nowadays, there is a rapid growth in different sciences that has led to thousands of publications in the form of scientific research papers. The readers of these papers are generally the people that are involved in science (i.e. researchers, students, teachers and professors). On the other hand, practitioners rarely use these articles as a resource to learn and apply new methods. They prefer an easy to understand, step-by-step guide (i.e. cookbook) helping them skip over the difficult scientific terms and structures. Therefore, because of a shortage of tools in this space, it takes practitioners many years to use newly developed methods.

The purpose of this study is to review the literature on verified repositories and presents the necessity of method repositories.

This paper aims to introduce method repositories as new tools to bridge the gap between science and practice.

Method repositories presented in this paper act as an easy to understand guide for newly developed methods in specific fields.