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)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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 Presence of a Research Center as a Research Dissemination Platform: Reach and Resources
Background:
Web-based platforms can be powerful tools for research dissemination. By leveraging the advantages of mass media and interpersonal channels of communication, Web-based dissemination platforms may improve awareness about, and subsequent adoption of, evidence-based practices (EBPs). Digital dissemination strategies can augment traditional dissemination models, improving stakeholder access to digestible and actionable information and promoting translation of EBPs.
Objective:
This study aimed 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. The website features include summaries of digital behavioral health approaches and related empirical literature, a blog feed focused on the 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 1160 posts in the CTBH blog feed, including 180 summaries of scholarly articles. The Twitter and Facebook accounts have 577 and 1500 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 serves as a model for how to leverage accessible and easily updatable digital platforms as research dissemination channels. Digital dissemination tools can augment traditional dissemination strategies to promote awareness about evidence-based digital therapeutic approaches for behavioral health and health care more broadly.
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.