Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 11, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 15, 2019 - Sep 9, 2019
Date Accepted: Jan 26, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Improving engagement with mHealth in chronic patients: a systematic review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Chronic disease burden continues being a principal healthcare system concern, in addition to the integration of mHealth interventions for telemonitoring of these patients. These facilities permit patients to increase their involvement in the decisions related to treatment and more control of their prognosis. But little is known about the degree to which users engage and interaction matches the usage pattern for which the mHealth interventions were designed.
Objective:
To describe the characteristics and results of mHealth tools that have investigated the effects of these interventions on the patient’s engagement in the context of chronic diseases.
Methods:
A systematic technique was used to recover systematic reviews of interventional studies focused on the engagement of chronic patients using mHealth technologies for critical analysis. The search strategy (from 1st January 2010) was adapted to MEDLINE (Pubmed), EMBASE, The Cochrane Library, PychoINFO and Scielo. Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) tool was applied for studies quality assessment. Engagement was described as the level of patient implication or participation in self-care interventions. The number of logs to website or platform, the frequency of usage, the amount of messages exchange and task completion were used as engagement measures.
Results:
Initially, 627 papers were detected, after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria 10 studies were included. Sample size oscillated between 6 and 270 individuals predominantly men. Cardiac disease was the principal target to compare traditional and mHealth interventions for engagement improvement. Patient’s involvement with mHealth technologies varied between 50% and 97%, the highest level with smartphones devices limited to one or two tools.
Conclusions:
The mHealth interventions yielded an improvement of engagement. However, there are scarce studies that use specific engagement’s measures and the period of study is usually shorter. Smartphones with a single tool with reminders feature can improve patient’s involvement and induce to a higher engagement with mHealth interventions in chronic patients.
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