Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Sep 24, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 17, 2020
Digital Medicine Community Perspectives and Challenges: Survey Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The field of digital medicine has seen rapid growth over the past decade. With this unfettered growth, challenges surrounding interoperability have emerged as a critical barrier to translate digital medicine into practice. In order to understand how to mitigate challenges in digital medicine research and practice, this community must understand the landscape of digital medicine professionals, which digital medicine tools are being used and how, and user perspectives on current challenges in the field of digital medicine.
Objective:
The primary objective of this study is to provide information to the digital medicine community that is working to establish frameworks and best practices for interoperability in digital medicine.
Methods:
We used a web-based survey to query a total of 56 digital medicine professionals from May 1, 2020 – July 10, 2020 on their educational and work experience, the sensors, file types, and toolkits they utilize professionally, and their perspectives on interoperability in digital medicine.
Results:
We determined that the digital medicine community comes from diverse educational backgrounds and uses a variety of sensors and file types. There is consensus that interoperability is a critical impediment in digital medicine. We identified three key interoperability needs to be met: integration with electronic health records, implementation of standard data schemas, and lack of standard and verifiable methods for digital medicine research.
Conclusions:
Understanding the digital medicine community, the sensors and file types they utilize, and their perspectives on interoperability will enable the development and implementation of solutions that fill critical interoperability gaps in digital medicine. Developing best practices and implementing approaches for digital medicine interoperability will be critical to advancing the field of digital medicine.
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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.