Key Intervention Characteristics in e-Health: Steps Towards Standardized Communication

Abstract

PurposeThis paper reports expert opinion on e-health intervention characteristics that enable effective communication of characteristics across the diverse field of e-health interventions. The paper presents a visualization tool to support communication of the defining characteristics.MethodsAn initial list of e-health intervention characteristics was developed through an iterative process of item generation and discussion among the 12 authors. The list was distributed to 123 experts in the field, who were emailed an invitation to assess and rank the items. Participants were asked to evaluate these characteristics in three separate ways.ResultsA total of 50 responses were received for a response rate of 40.7%. Six respondents who reported having little or no expertise in e-health research were removed from the dataset.Our results suggest that 10 specific intervention characteristics were consistently supported as of central importance by the panel of 44 e-intervention experts. The weight and perceived relevance of individual items differed between experts; oftentimes, this difference is a result of the individual theoretical perspective and/or behavioral target of interest.ConclusionsThe first iteration of the visualization of salient characteristics represents an ambitious effort to develop a tool that will support communication of the defining characteristics for e-health interventions aimed to assist e-health developers and researchers to communicate the key characteristics of their interventions in a standardized manner that facilitates dialog.

Editorial on IJBM Special Issue—E-Health Interventions for Addictive Behaviors

“…All articles concerning methodology in this issue thus have, at heart, such recognition of the importance of the pace of technological development as a significant context for e-health methodology and health outcomes. The methodological concerns and design reflections raised in the empirical and descriptive papers are all elements that are included as key descriptive components of the tool for visualizing and communicating e-health interventions developed by Bewick et al [2]. This exemplifies the applicability of the tool and further substantiates the ranking of characteristics included in the tool.…”

“…The visualization tool addresses an overarching challenge of communication within and between researchers and developers in the field of e-health interventions. While the empirical articles concerning methodology [3][4][5] rightly stress the development of e-interventions as an interdisciplinary team effort and the importance of a diverse methodological approach, Bewick et al show how the tremendous diversity in reporting and describing key factors is partly due to disciplinary variation, making apparent the dire need for ways to communicate key characteristics in a more standardized fashion [2]. In sum, the visualization tool article by Bewick et al takes on the ambitious challenge of defining key intervention characteristics in e-health interventions as an outset for proposing a tool that may facilitate more precise and accessible descriptions of e-health interventions across the interdisciplinary field of researchers, developers, and practitioners.…”

“…Cerrada et al address the transferability of the app they developed to other areas of behavior change [3], and Goldstein et al describe a number of methodological issues with general application value to the field that arose while developing their app and generated recommendations to the general course of e-health design processes based on this [4]. Bewick et al also drew on crowd feedback from experts to identify key intervention characteristics and have made the visualization tool openly available for use and feedback from developers and researchers in the field [2], see Fig. 1.…”

“…2 The network focused on developing the descriptive e-health intervention tool described in this issue, and on engaging in an ongoing discourse on the components, or Batoms^of alliance between the intervention user, the clinician, and the e-health intervention itself. Our discourse raised many questions regarding alliance, methodology, and outcomes, many of which are discussed and partly answered in this special issue.…”

“…One gives an overview of the empirical status of the field regarding outcomes for one of the behaviors we focused on, problematic alcohol use, in a systematic review of reviews [1]. The second offers a tool for describing e-health interventions, as a step towards standardized reporting of such interventions, to facilitate communication about them and comparison between them [2]. See Fig.…”