JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Connected Health (CH) as a new paradigm looks after the individual and community health in a connected and holistic manner by leveraging a variety of technologies and has a promising potential for the incorporation of telehealth and integrated care services, covering the whole spectrum of health-related services addressing healthy subjects and chronic patients. The reorganization of services around the person or citizen has been expected to bring high impact in the health domain. A series of concerns (e.g., contextual factors influencing the impact of care models, the cost savings associated with CH solutions, the sustainability of the CH ecosystem, and others are the CH concerns) should be addressed better to reach stakeholders more successfully. Overall, there is a need to synchronize an understanding of the concepts of CH impact better. As services based on Connected Health technologies go beyond standard clinical interventions and assessments of medical devices or medical treatments, the need for standardization and new ways of measurements and assessments emerge when studying CH impact.

Objective:

This paper aims to introduce the Connected Health Impart Framework (CHIF) that serves an approach to assess the impact of CH services.

Methods:

This work focuses on the subset of CH consisting of services that directly address patients and citizens toward the management of disease or health and wellness. The CHIF is developed through various activities, including literature review, workshop focusing on knowledge elicitation regarding CH concepts, development of the initial version of the framework and framework refining with the experts as the result of the second workshop, and composing and deploying a questionnaire for preliminary feedback from early-stage researchers in the relevant domains.

Results:

The developed framework addresses the needs for a better understanding of what is CH impact, support in better designing of CH services from the perspective of how to achieve the impact, and understanding of methods to assess, gather knowledge and compare impact in CH services. The CHIF is based on the four concepts, including CH system and service outline, CH system end users, CH outcomes, and factors towards achieving CH impact. The framework is visualized as an ontological model.

Conclusions:

The CHIF is an initial step towards methodologies to objectively measure CH impact while recognizing its multiple dimensions and scales.