JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the adoption of home telemonitoring to cope with social distance challenges. However, policy-makers and practitioners did not have enough information to decide which pilot intervention they should disseminate into mainstream care delivery.

Objective:

This review aims to identify the domains and methods used in peer-reviewed studies under real-life conditions for evaluating home telemonitoring-based interventions’ scalability.

Methods:

The authors followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and used multiple databases (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and EconLit). Lastly, the authors conducted a narrative analysis to identify domains and methods to support scalability assessment.

Results:

The authors identified 13 articles focused on the ability to expand a home telemonitoring intervention. While most of the studies considered the problem, intervention, effectiveness, costs, and benefits of the intervention delivery as relevant domains for scalability assessment, studies did not always consider domains such as socio-political context, setting, workforce, and technological infrastructure. Researchers used different methods to assess effectiveness, costs, benefits, and acceptability. Although cost-effectiveness was the most common method, researchers evaluated the costing domain using seven cost analysis methods.

Conclusions:

The review suggests that researchers select the same domains when assessing scalability, to the detriment of others also relevant. Additionally, studies use different methods to evaluate the same domain, which makes comparison difficult. Future work should examine the minimum required domains and suggest methods that would enable comparison among studies and provide better support for decision-making on whether to scale-up them.