BACKGROUND
Digital health represents an important strategy in the future of healthcare delivery. Over the past decade, mHealth has accelerated the agency of healthcare users. Despite prevailing excitement about the potential of digital health, questions remain on efficacy, uptake, usability and patience outcome. This challenge is confounded by two industries, DIGITAL and HEALTH, that have vastly different approaches to research, design, testing and implementation. In this regard, there is a need to examine prevailing design approaches, to weigh their benefits and challenges towards implementation, and to recommend a path forward that synthesises the needs of this complex stakeholder group.
OBJECTIVE
This review studies prominent digital health intervention (DHI) design approaches mediating the digital health space. In doing so, we seek to examine each methodology’s: origins, perceived benefits, contrasting nuances, challenges, and typical use-case scenarios.
METHODS
A narrative synthesis approach to literature review was employed to review existing evidence. We searched indexed scientific literature using keywords relative to different digital health intervention designs. Papers selected after screening were those that discussed the design and implementation of digital health design approaches.
RESULTS
120 papers on intervention design were selected for full-text review. We selected the 20 most prominent papers on each design approach, synthesizing findings under the categories of origins, advantages, disadvantages, challenges and cases.
CONCLUSIONS
Digital health is experiencing the growing pains of rapid expansion. Currently, numerous design approaches are being implemented in order to harmonise the needs of a complex stakeholder group. Whether the primary stakeholder is positioned as the end-user/person/human/patient, the challenge to synthesise the constraints and affordances of both digital design and healthcare, built equally around user satisfaction and clinically efficacy remains paramount. Further research that works towards a transdisciplinarity in digital health may help to break down friction in this field. Until digital health is viewed as a hybridised industry with unique requirements rather than competing interests, the nuances that each design approach posits will be difficult to realise in a real world context. We encourage the collaboration of digital and health experts within hybrid design teams, through all stages of intervention design, in order to create a better digital health culture and design ethos.