Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Jun 13, 2024)
Date Submitted: Oct 4, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Digital nudging in healthcare: A PRISMA systematic review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Effective decision-making plays a crucial role in healthcare, directly impacting the quality of care and overall health outcomes. Digital nudging has emerged as a novel intervention that leverages behavioral economics and digital technology to guide people's decision-making processes in healthcare.
Objective:
The objective of this systematic review is to investigate the utilization and efficacy of digital nudging in healthcare, as well as their impacts on care quality and health outcomes.
Methods:
To assess the impacts of digital nudging on decision-making in study, encompassing PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, spanned from January 1, 2018, to April 15, 2023. Additionally, we performed an analysis to evaluate the potential role of digital nudging in healthcare. To ensure effective categorization of digital nudging strategies, we classified them into four distinct groups, taking into account two key factors: the intended purpose of the digital nudging (guidance or limitation) and the decision-making mode of the participants (enhancing motivation or increasing acceptability of the behavior).
Results:
29 out of the 35 included studies (82.86%) significantly influenced participant behavior. After excluding studies assessed as high risk, an even larger percentage (90.9%) of studies demonstrated that digital nudging strategies improved care outcomes and clinical decision making. In particularly, digital nudging strategies that made participants more receptive to the behavior by setting default options, for example, were more effective in bringing about behavioral changes.
Conclusions:
The implementation of digital nudging has been shown to be an effective strategy for improving decision-making in the healthcare scenarios. By employing the proposed classification framework, this study offers valuable insights into the essential factors that should be taken into account while designing digital nudging strategies, thereby assisting policymakers in this domain.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.