Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 16, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 15, 2022 - Dec 10, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 15, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Interventions Aimed at Enhancing Healthcare Providers' Behaviour towards the Prescription of Mobile Health Apps: A Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mobile health (mHealth) apps have great potential to support the management of chronic conditions. Despite widespread acceptance of mHealth apps by the public, healthcare providers (HCPs) are reluctant to prescribe or recommend such apps to their patients.
Objective:
This study aimed to classify and evaluate interventions aimed at encouraging mHealth app prescription among HCPs.
Methods:
A systematic literature search was conducted to identify studies published from January 2008 to August 2022 using four electronic databases: MEDLINE, Scopus, CINAHL and PsycInfo. We included studies that evaluated interventions encouraging HCPs to prescribe mHealth apps. Two review authors independently assessed the eligibility of the studies. The studies were assessed for risk of bias. Due to high levels of heterogeneity between interventions, measures of practice change, specialties of HCPs and modes of delivery, we conducted a qualitative analysis. We adopted the behaviour change wheel (BCW) as a framework for classifying the included interventions according to intervention functions.
Results:
Eleven studies were included in this review. Most of the studies reported positive findings, with improvements in a number of outcomes, including increased knowledge of mHealth apps among clinicians, improved self-efficacy or confidence in prescribing and changes in current practices. Based on the BCW, environmental restructuring was the most frequently used intervention function in the included studies, followed by education and then training. Coercion and restriction were not reported in any of the interventions included. The quality of the studies was high in relation to the clarity of aims, interventions and outcomes, but weaker in terms of sample sizes, power calculations and duration of follow-up.
Conclusions:
This study identified interventions to increase HCPs app prescriptions. The findings of this review can help inform mHealth providers and policymakers regarding the key intervention strategies impacting mHealth prescriptions and assist them in making informed decisions to encourage this adoption.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.