JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

While health systems have been sluggish in their adoption of novel digital health technologies over the last 20 years, the start of a new decade brings fresh hope that these innovations will more widely embraced. Slow adoption of digital health solutions, in particular information communication technologies, is often due to implementation failures; a challenge spurring development of frameworks to help navigate this uncertain and messy process. These frameworks point to crucial environmental, organizational, individual and technological components that have been shown to drive or hinder implementation. Often these frameworks are operationalized through a series of questions to ask through the implementation process to help ensure challenges are mitigated and opportunities are exploited. While these frameworks offer the right questions to ask to guide implementation, there remains the challenge of how to interpret and act upon the answers. In this commentary I suggest that to use these frameworks effectively, we need to attend to philosophical and psychological meaningfulness for users and organizations in which technologies are adopted. By focusing on meaningfulness we can ensure innovations have perceived value and purpose for users and organizations, leading to a greater willingness to adapt behaviours and processes required when implementing any innovation. Drawing on the literature and experiences in developing, evaluating and implementing digital technologies, recommendations on how qualitative methods can be used to uncover meaningfulness as a means to guide implementation are offered, so we can spend the next decade focusing efforts on driving meaningful innovation in our health systems.