Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Nov 20, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 28, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Rural health professionals’ perceptions of persuasive design solutions to improve health workforce capability: what do users want and how does an App help?
ABSTRACT
Background:
Health professionals’ perceptions of persuasive design techniques for use in technological solutions to improve health workforce capability have not been previously explored.
Objective:
To explore rural health professionals’ perceptions of health workforce capability and persuasive design techniques; and translate these into recommendations for designing a health workforce capability app to increase their impact and usefulness.
Methods:
Qualitative interviews with rural health professionals were conducted. Subsequently, 32 persuasive techniques were used as a framework to deductively analyse the data. Persuasive design technique domains included Primary Task Support, Dialogue Support, System Credibility Support, Social Support and Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion.
Results:
Persuasive design techniques can be applied across the factors that influence health workforce capability including health and personal qualities, competencies and skills, values, attitudes and motivation, factors that operate outside of work, and at the team, organisational and labour market levels. The majority of the 32 persuasive design techniques were reflected in the data from the interviews and led to recommendations as to how these could be translated into practice, with the exception of scarcity. Many suggestions and persuasive design techniques link back to the need for tailored and localised solutions such as the need for country-specific based evidence, the wish for localised communities of practice, learning from other rural health professionals and referral pathways to other clinicians. Participants identified how persuasive design techniques can optimise the user experience to help meet rural health professionals needs for more efficient systems to improve patient access to care; quality care; and to enable working in interprofessional team-based care. Social inclusion plays a vital role for health professionals, indicating the importance of the Social Support domain of persuasive techniques. Overall, health professionals were open to self-monitoring of their work performance and some professionals used wearables to monitor their health.
Conclusions:
Rural health professionals’ perceptions of health workforce capability informed which persuasive design techniques can be used to optimise the user experience of an app. These were translated into recommendations for designing a health workforce capability app to increase likelihood of adoption. This study has also contributed to the further validation of the Persuasive Systems Design model (Koonas, 2009) through empirically aligning elements of the model to increase persuasive system content and functionality with real-world applied data, in this case the health workforce capability of rural health professionals. Our findings confirm that these techniques can be used to develop a future prototype of an app that may assist health professionals in improving or maintaining their health workforce capability which in turn may increase recruitment and retention in rural areas. Health professionals need to be central during the design phase. Interventions are needed to provide a supportive environment to rural and remote HPs to increase their rural health workforce capability.
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