JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental health conditions are considered the leading cause of disability, sickness absence, and long-term work incapacity in most developed countries. EHealth interventions provide employees with access to psychological assistance. There has been widespread implementation and provision of eHealth interventions in the workplace as an inexpensive and anonymous way of addressing common mental disorders

Objective:

The aims of this updated review were to synthesize the literature of the efficacy of eHealth interventions for anxiety, depression, and stress outcomes in employee samples in organisational settings, and evaluate whether their effectiveness has improved over time.

Methods:

Systematic searches in relevant articles published from 2004 - July 2020 of trials of eHealth interventions (App or web-based) focused on the mental health of employees. The quality and bias of all studies was assessed. We extracted means and standard deviations from publications, comparing the difference in effect sizes (Hedge’s g) in standardized mental health outcomes. We meta-analyzed these using a random effects model.

Results:

We identified a tripling of the body of evidence, with 75 trials available for meta-analysis, with a combined sample of n=14,747. EHealth interventions showed small positive effects for anxiety (g=0.26), depression (g=0.26), and stress (g=0.25) in employees’ post-intervention, with similar effects seen at the medium term follow up. There was evidence for no increase in the effectiveness of these interventions over the past decade.

Conclusions:

This review and meta-analysis confirm that eHealth interventions have a small, positive impact on reducing mental health symptoms in employees. Disappointingly we found no evidence that, despite the advances in technology, the enormous resources in time, research and finance devoted to this area for over a decade, we are producing better interventions. Hopefully these small effect sizes do not represent the optimum outcome in organisational settings. Clinical Trial: The systematic review protocol was registered on PROSPERO: CRD42020185859.