Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 21, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 5, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Understanding eHealth Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy Targeting Sub-stance Use: A Realist Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
There is a growing body of evidence on eHealth interventions that are targeting substance use disorders. Development and decision-making in eHealth has been challenging due to the lack of understanding of how programs work effectively.
Objective:
We conducted a realist review on literature of Electronic Health Cognitive-behavioural Therapy (eCBT) programs for substance use with the goal of answering the following realist question: “how do different eCBT interventions for substance use interact with different contexts to pro-duce certain outcomes?”
Methods:
A literature search of published and gray literature of all eHealth programs targeting substance use was conducted. After data extraction, the scope was refined to only include literature fo-cusing on eCBT programs targeting substance use. We synthesized the available qualitative evidence from the literature into Context-Mechanism-Outcome configurations in order to bet-ter understand when and how programs work.
Results:
A total of 54 papers studying 24 programs were reviewed. Our final results identified 8 Con-text-Mechanism-Outcome configurations from 5 unique programs that met criteria for rele-vance and rigor.
Conclusions:
5 strategies that may be applied in future eCBT programs for substance use are discussed and may contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms and ultimately help design more ef-fective solutions in the future. Future research on eHealth CBT programs should try and under-stand mechanisms of program strategies and how they lead to outcomes in different contexts.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.