Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jul 24, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 28, 2018 - Sep 21, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 23, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Digital Presence of a Research Center as a Research Dissemination Platform: Reach and Resources
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online platforms can be powerful tools for research dissemination. By leveraging the advantages of mass media and interpersonal channels of communication, online dissemination platforms may improve awareness about and subsequent adoption of of evidence-based practices. Digital dissemination strategies can augment traditional dissemination models, improving stakeholder access to digestible and actionable information and promoting translation of evidence-based practices.
Objective:
To describe the reach and content of the web presence of a National Institute on Drug Abuse Center of Excellence and how it is used to disseminate research related to digital behavioral health approaches.
Methods:
The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) has a website and regularly updated Facebook and Twitter accounts. Website features include summaries of digital behavioral health approaches and related empirical literature, a blog feed focused on state of the science and technology concerning digital health care approaches, and a newsletter about Center activities. We extracted website usage metrics from Google Analytics and follower counts from social media accounts for the period from March 1, 2013 to July 17, 2018.
Results:
Since the implementation of analytic tracking, 70,331 users have initiated 96,995 sessions on the CTBH website. The website includes summaries of 86 digital therapeutic programs, encompassing 447 empirical articles. There are 1,160 posts in CTBH’s blog feed, including 180 summaries of scholarly articles. The Twitter and Facebook accounts have 577 and 1,500 followers, respectively. The newsletter has reached a growing subscriber network and has a high open-rate relative to industry standards.
Conclusions:
The CTBH web presence is a model for effective dissemination of research findings using web-based platforms.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
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.