Accepted for/Published in: Online Journal of Public Health Informatics
Date Submitted: Jun 28, 2023
Date Accepted: Aug 1, 2024
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Quality, service content and user evaluation of vaccination service applications: A cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Vaccination services are increasingly in demand by the public, and mobile applications are being used as an effective tool to meet that demand. However, the characteristics and quality of such applications are not yet known.
Objective:
Objective:
Commonly used vaccination service applications on the market were surveyed regarding quality, service content and user experience to evaluate and guide users.
Methods:
Methods:
The Qimai Data mobile application data analytics platform was used to search for common vaccination service applications by keyword, and the WeChat and Alipay platforms were searched with for the applications. The applications included in the study were independently evaluated by 2 reviewers using the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS), and the service content and user experience of the applications were analysed. The intragroup correlation coefficient (ICC) between raters was used as a measure of interrater reliability.
Results:
Results:
In the application stores of the four major Android platforms and the application store of iOS, 1092 and 207 applications were found, respectively, 189 WeChat applets and 30 Alipay applets were also found. A total of 29 applications were finally included in this study according to the nadir criteria. Among them, there were 21 independent applications, 4 WeChat applets and 4 Alipay applets. Significant differences were found between independent applications and applets in terms of quality score (t=-5.301, p<0.001) and subjective quality score (t=-4.753, p<0.001). No significant differences were found between iOS and Android platforms in terms of quality score (t=-2.55, p=0.799) and subjective quality score (z=-0.137, p=0.891). There was good intragroup consistency among the raters.
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
In this study, independent applications and nonindependent applications that rely on social and payment platforms for implementation were included in the vaccination services class. The overall quality of such applications was acceptable. Nonindependent running applications were found to have slightly lower scores and room for improvement, and scores in the participatory applications were found to be generally low overall.
Citation
