Currently submitted to: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Feb 12, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 13, 2025 - Apr 10, 2025
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Informing organizational strategies for digital public health: A qualitative description of practitioners’ perspectives on opportunities and challenges in a provincial public health organization in Canada
ABSTRACT
Background:
The digital transformation of health services accelerated during the pandemic. While “digital health” strategies were created, they paid minimal attention to public health services like health promotion, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness, and health protection.
Objective:
To inform a digital public health (DPH) strategy at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), we explored public health practitioners’ perspectives on challenges and opportunities of integrating digital technologies into public health functions within the organization.
Methods:
In this qualitative description, we conducted 18 focus groups (FGs) between January and June 2023, drawing practitioners from nine organizational subunits of the BCCDC including population and public health, environmental health, clinical services, vaccine preventable diseases, communications, knowledge translation, data analytics and Indigenous health (2 FGs per subunit). Discussions explored practitioners’ application of digital technologies in their public health work, focusing on challenges encountered during implementation (current state FGs) and perceived opportunities (future state FGs). Sessions were audio-recorded, and detailed field notes were taken. Thematic analysis was conducted, comparing perspectives across groups using constant comparative techniques.
Results:
We identified three themes. First, “bridging existing inequities - an opportunity and a challenge contingent on public trust” described participants’ excitement about opportunities for DPH to disrupt historical inequities if centred on trust and reconciliation, while recognizing current digital transformation efforts risk exacerbating existing inequities with the digital divide. Second “a sense of disconnect between “digital” and “public health” functions” described perceptions of DPH as being out of scope of core public health duties, requiring new competencies and navigation of complex organizational policies for which support is suboptimal. Third, “balancing the need for responsive DPH with necessary reactivity” highlighted practitioners’ yearnings for a proactive DPH strategy rather than current issue-based reactive approaches. Participants suggest a centralized systematic program can help achieve this goal.
Conclusions:
A cohesive, systematic, and proactive organizational strategy for DPH is critical to enable equity-focused digital transformation. Such a strategy can bridge perceived disconnects between digital and public health functions through organizational supports like competency development and streamlined policies can better support public health practitioners to integrate digital technologies into their work. Clinical Trial: N/A
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