JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Health professions education has undergone major changes with the advent and adoption of digital technologies worldwide.

Objective:

To enable robust and relevant research in digital health professions education, it is essential to map the existing evidence, identify gaps and research priorities.

Methods:

We searched for systematic reviews on digital education of practicing and student healthcare professionals. We searched Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, ERIC, CINAHL, and grey literature sources from January 2014 to July 2020. Two authors independently screened the studies, extracted the data, and synthesized the findings. We outlined the key characteristics of the included reviews, the quality of the evidence they synthesized, and recommendations for future research. We mapped the empiric findings and research recommendations against a newly developed conceptual framework.

Results:

We identified 77 eligible systematic reviews. All included experimental studies and evaluated the effectiveness of digital education interventions in different healthcare disciplines or of different digital education modalities. Most reviews included studies on various digital education modalities (N=22), virtual reality (N=19) and online education (N=10). Most reviews focused on health professions education in general (N=36), surgery (N=13) and nursing (N=11). The reviews mainly assessed participants’ skills (N=51) and knowledge (N=49) and included data from high-income countries (N=53). Our novel conceptual framework of digital health professions education comprises six key domains (context, infrastructure, education, learners, research, and quality improvement) and 16 subdomains. Finally, we identified in these reviews 61 unique questions for future research; these mapped to framework domains of education (29 recommendations), context (17), infrastructure (9), learners (3), and research (3).

Conclusions:

We have identified a large number of research questions regarding digital education, that collectively reflect a diverse and comprehensive research agenda. Our conceptual framework will help educators and researchers plan, develop, and study digital education. More evidence from developing countries is needed.