JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

There is a need to further investigate how persuasive design principles can change rural health professionals’ behaviours to look after their own health workforce capability. Several theories are used when developing Apps to persuade people to change behaviour including the Persuasive System Design Model, consisting of primary task, dialogue, system credibility, and social support categories, and Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion. These have not been analysed yet in the field of health workforce capability.

Objective:

To determine the persuasive design techniques (PT) used in capability-building related apps; and to provide recommendations for designing a health workforce application to increase their persuasiveness.

Methods:

A python script was used to extract a total of 3060 apps from Google Play. Key words centred around health workforce capability elements. App inclusion criteria were: being updated since 2019, rated by users on average four and above, more than 100,000 downloads. Two experts reviewed whether 32 persuasive strategies were used in the selected apps and these were further analysed by capability domains: competencies and skills, health and personal qualities, values and attitudes and the organisation of work.

Results:

Fifty-three mobile applications were systematically reviewed to identify the persuasive design techniques. The most common were ‘surface credibility’ (n=48) and ‘liking’ (n=48), followed by ‘trustworthiness’ (n=43), ‘reminders’ (n=38) and ‘suggestion’ (n=30). The domain ‘Social Support’ persuasive techniques were the least employed across the different apps analysed for health workforce capability whereas ‘Primary Task Support’ were used most frequently. The recommendations reflect learnings from our analysis. These findings provided insight into mobile application design principles relevant to apps utilised in improving health workforce capability.

Conclusions:

There are many persuasive design techniques that can assist in building capability. Additionally, several apps are available in the market that can assist in improving health workforce capability. There is, however, a specific lack of digital real time support to improve health workforce capability. Social support strategies through using social support persuasive design techniques will need to be integrated more prominently into a rural health workforce capability application. An application to measure and monitor health workforce capability scores can be used in conjunction with direct real-world person and real-time support to discuss and identify solutions to improve health workforce capability for rural and remote HPs who are at high-risk of burnout or leaving the rural health workforce.