JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Hypertension is the root cause of many chronic diseases. Lifestyle changes, i.e., dietary alterations and physical activity, were seen to be an important step in the prevention and treatment of hypertension. Educating people through the web-based interventional programs could offer an effective solution and help these hypertensive patients in the existing healthcare scenario.

Objective:

In this study, the researchers conducted a literature review of the web-based dietary changes and physical activity-related intervention programs designed for the hypertensive patients, for identifying the methodologies, effectiveness, protocols and the theories that could affect and improve the existing clinical activities.

Methods:

This review is supported by the 5-stage framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley, for mapping the relevant studies published in the literature in the following manner: (1) Identifying the research questions; (2) Identifying the relevant studies; (3) Selection of such studies for further reviewing; (4) Charting the data from the selected studies in the literature; and (5) Summarising the reports and the results. Here, the researchers carried an electronic and manual search of the 6 databases. They have summarised all the data based on the characteristics of the different web-based tools (i.e., structure, function, and communication paradigm), context and users, intended use, evaluation (of the study design and the outcomes) using the studies in the literature.

Results:

The researchers selected 15 web-based intervention articles published on the topic of hypertension from 7 countries. A few of these web-based tools (26.5%, 4/15) included >3 functions and provided a lot of important information (like appointments, health record, or viewable care). Several tools were seen to be standalone tools (73.5%, 11/15), while a majority of the tools supported the communication intervention-related lifestyle or behavioural changes (86.5%, 13/15) and the medication adherence (40%, 6/15). It was seen that physicians (60%, 9/15), allied health professionals from different disciplines (33.5%, 5/15), and nurses (33.5%, 5/15), were the healthcare providers who generally used these tools for communicating with their patients. More than half of the above tools (67%, 10/15) were assessed by different researchers in the randomised controlled trials, while 5 tools (33%, 5/15) were investigated in the non-randomised studies.

Conclusions:

In this study, the researchers identified many web-based intervention programs for hypertensive patients from the databases. They stated that developers need to consider the preferences of the patients with regards to the information or the design features while developing or modifying the web-based educational websites. These tools could be used for designing a patient-tailored website intervention program which was based on the diet and the physical activities for the hypertensive patients.