Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Feb 25, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 28, 2019 - Mar 28, 2019
Date Accepted: May 27, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Patients’ perceptions of mhealth apps: a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mobile phone and tablets are increasingly being integrated in the daily life of many people around the word. mHealth apps offer appealing possibilities to optimize health systems, to improve care and health promotion, and to reduce health disparities. However, health care apps seem to be underutilized after being download.
Objective:
The aim of this paper is to better understand peoples’ perceptions, beliefs and experience regarding mHealth app as well as whether or not they value it.
Methods:
A systematic literature review of qualitative research articles relating to the perception of patients regarding mHealth published in English between January 2013 and June 2018 was undertaken. Data extracted from the articles were synthesized using the meta-ethnography framework and interpretive method.
Results:
354 articles were selected for screening, and 44 articles met the inclusion criteria. Most of the articles extracted studied populations of developed nations, were published in the last two years, and most of the apps evaluated were tailored for chronic diseases. Our analysis extract benefits and challenges/critiques of using mHealth apps in the patients’ perspectives. The benefits can be categorized into two themes (engaging patient in healthcare and increasing patient empowerment) while the challenges or critiques have four components to it (trustworthiness, appropriateness, personalization, accessibility).
Conclusions:
Although many patients perceived mHealth apps as a useful and complementary tool, major problems regarding the optimal use of mHealth technologies include tailored design, cost, validity of information, and security and privacy issues. Many of the challenges can be lifted if there were more support from health providers. Additionally, standards could be implemented to ensure that applications are providing accurate and evidence-based information to patients.
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© 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.