JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital Public Health (DiPH) interventions may help us tackle substantial public health challenges, present valuable opportunities to improve and complement existing services, and reach historically underserved populations. However, DiPH interventions are often triggered through technological advancements and opportunities rather than public health needs. In order to develop and evaluate interventions designed to serve public health needs, a comprehensive framework is needed that systematically covers all aspects relevant to public health. This includes taking into account the complexity of the technology, the context in which the technology is supposed to operate, its implementation, and its effects on public health including ethical, legal, or social aspects.

Objective:

We aimed to develop such a framework with a comprehensive list of core principles to be considered throughout the development and evaluation process of any DiPH intervention.

Methods:

The resulting Digital Public Health Framework “DigiPHrame” is based on a scoping review of existing digital health and public health frameworks. After extracting all assessment criteria from these frameworks, we clustered the criteria. During a series of multidisciplinary meetings with experts from the Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health, we restructured each domain to represent the complexity of digital public health.

Results:

The current framework consists of 182 questions nested under 12 domains. In this article, we use a COVID-19 contact tracing app as a use case to illustrate how the framework may be applied to assess DiPH interventions.

Conclusions:

DigiPHrame may help avoid overlooking important aspects that would otherwise result in low-value interventions that are not user-friendly, violate (data protection) law, or are not sustainable. As a living framework, DigiPHrame will be updated regularly as new public health needs and technological advancements emerge.