Implementation of Digital Monitoring Services During the COVID-19 Pandemic for Patients With Chronic Diseases: Design Science Approach

Implementing an online pharmaceutical service using design science research

The rising prevalence of chronic diseases is pressing health systems to introduce reforms. Primary healthcare and multidisciplinary models have been suggested as approaches to deal with this challenge, with new roles for nurses and pharmacists being advocated. More recently, implementing healthcare based on information systems and technologies (e.g. eHealth) has been proposed as a way to improve health services. However, implementing online pharmaceutical services, including their adoption by pharmacists and patients, is still an open research question. In this paper we present ePharmacare, a new online pharmaceutical service implemented using Design Science Research.

Implementation Science for AI Integration in Digital Health Systems

We systematically reviewed studies of implementation science frameworks used for healthcare AI deployment (2020-2026). Following PRISMA 2020, we searched MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, and Scopus and included 87 empirical studies. CFIR was most common (42.5%), followed by RE-AIM (28.7%) and EPIS (18.4%). The most frequent barriers were data infrastructure limitations (67.8%), clinician trust deficits (58.6%), and regulatory uncertainty (52.9%). Implementation success was associated with organizational readiness (r=0.64, p

Co-creation process of an app for people with rare diseases - a citizen science approach

Background Rare diseases affect a small percentage of the population, leading to challenges such as delayed diagnoses and limited treatment options. Mobile health technologies offer solutions to improve patient outcomes, yet their application in rare diseases remains underexplored. The German citizen science project SelEe created a customizable app for the self-management of rare diseases through a co-creation process that involved patients with such conditions. Methods The project consisted of three phases. In Phase 1, 9 to 68 patients or relatives of patients participated in workshops to define research topics and app requirements. Phase 2 involved a core research team of nine patients and researchers who iteratively developed the app, released in March 2023. Phase 3 focused on evaluating the app’s usage and usability through an in-app survey conducted from March 2023 to February 2024. We utilized descriptive statistics to evaluate app usage and employed the mHealth App Usability Questionnaire to assess usability. Results The SelEe app offers the possibility to create and store data in a personalized health diary. Patients can create their own templates or use templates which were defined by the core research team. Users can record findings (e.g. blood test results) and export data using different graphs and formats. Furthermore, the app supports blind users. The app was downloaded 3040 times and 1456 users registered, with 1967 unique diseases entered. 50.7% of the diseases were rare, 30.5% non-rare, and 18.8% were classified as suspected, undefined, or symptoms. A total of 1223 valid user profiles were analyzed for app usage and demographics. Furthermore, 432 users qualified for the in-app survey by making at least one health diary entry, and 117 participated. The app was rated with an overall usability score of 5.19 out of 7. While the app’s health diary function was frequently used, other functionalities like findings and data export were less utilized. Feedback highlighted the need for improved usability and additional features. Conclusions The study highlights active patient engagement in developing a mobile health app for individuals with rare diseases. Although improvements are necessary for broader acceptance, the app is promising for the management of rare diseases. Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13023-025-04140-1.

Archive: New COVID-19 ‘Citizen Science’ Initiative Lets Any Adult with a Smartphone Help to Fight Coronavirus

The online study would try to help researchers gain insight into how the virus is spreading and identify ways to predict and reduce the number of new infections.

Citizen involvement in research on technological innovations for health, care or well-being: a scoping review

Citizen science can be a powerful approach to foster the successful implementation of technological innovations in health, care or well-being. Involving experience experts as co-researchers or co-designers of technological innovations facilitates mutual learning, community building, and empowerment. By utilizing the expert knowledge of the intended users, innovations have a better chance to get adopted and solve complex health-related problems. As citizen science is still a relatively new practice for health and well-being, little is known about effective methods and guidelines for successful collaboration. This scoping review aims to provide insight in (1) the levels of citizen involvement in current research on technological innovations for health, care or well-being, (2) the used participatory methodologies, and (3) lesson’s learned by the researchers., A scoping review was conducted and reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The search was performed in SCOPUS in January 2021 and included peer-reviewed journal and conference papers published between 2016 and 2020. The final selection (N = 83) was limited to empirical studies that had a clear focus on technological innovations for health, care or well-being and involved citizens at the level of collaboration or higher. Our results show a growing interest in citizens science as an inclusive research approach. Citizens are predominantly involved in the design phase of innovations and less in the preparation, data-analyses or reporting phase. Eight records had citizens in the lead in one of the research phases., Researcher use different terms to describe their methodological approach including participatory design, co-design, community based participatory research, co-creation, public and patient involvement, partcipatory action research, user-centred design and citizen science. Our selection of cases shows that succesful citizen science projects develop a structural and longitudinal partnership with their collaborators, use a situated and adaptive research approach, and have researchers that are willing to abandon traditional power dynamics and engage in a mutual learning experience.

Avoidable mortality, risk factors and policies for tackling noncommunicable diseases – leveraging data for impact: monitoring commitments in the WHO European Region ahead of the Fourth United Nations High-Level Meeting

The report notes that, in order to tackle NCDs and address the commercial, social, environmental and digital determinants of health, there is a need for accelerated multisectoral whole-of-government and whole-of-society action, integrated policies, enhanced preventive measures and strengthened health systems.

Patient Led Research Collaborative  for Long COVID

About the Patient-Generated Hypotheses JournalPatient-Led Research Collaborative

Patient Led Research Collaborative  for Long COVID

About the Patient-Generated Hypotheses JournalPatient-Led Research Collaborative

The Story behind the Science: Preprints of pandemic potential—how bioRxiv and medRxiv brought preprints to the life sciences

ABSTRACT The bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint servers brought preprinting to the life sciences and played a critical role in disseminating COVID research during the pandemic. Here, I reflect on the birth of bioRxiv and medRxiv and the crucial role so many members of the community played, our experience during the pandemic, and the launch of the new non-profit organization set up to oversee the servers. The pandemic was a stress test for bioRxiv and medRxiv that demonstrated their value and robustness. Under the umbrella of openRxiv, they are now poised to become long-term infrastructure underpinning a new publishing ecosystem.

Business intelligence in the healthcare industry: The utilization of a data-driven approach to support clinical decision making

The pandemic has forced people to use digital technologies and accelerated the digitalization of many businesses. Using digital technologies generates a huge amount of data that are exploited by Business Intelligence (BI) to make decisions and improve the management of firms. This becomes particularly relevant in the healthcare sector where decisions are traditionally made on the physicians’ experience. Much work has been done on applying BI in the healthcare industry. Most of these studies were focused only on IT or medical aspects, while the usage of BI for improving the management of healthcare processes is an under-investigated field. This research aims at filling this gap by investigating whether a decision support system (DSS) model based on the exploitation of data through BI can outperform traditional experience-driven practices for managing processes in the healthcare domain. Focusing on the managing process of the therapeutic path of oncological patients, specifically BRCA-mutated women with breast cancer, a DSS model for benchmarking the costs of various treatment paths was developed in two versions: the first is experience-driven while the second is data-driven. We found that the data-driven version of the DSS model leads to a more accurate estimation of the costs that could potentially be prevented in the treatment of oncological patients, thus enabling significant cost savings. A more informed decision due to a more accurate cost estimation becomes crucial in a context where optimal treatment and unique clinical recommendations for patients are absent, thus permitting a substantial improvement of the decision making in the healthcare industry.

ChatGPT Health and what AI can do for a broken system

Healthcare isn’t working for patients or doctors, but AI tools can help.

Welcome to the Relational Design Lab | LX Cast | 19 comments

Today I am VERY excited to share with all of you about my new home, Relational Design Lab! This R&D studio brings together a number of projects and will, I hope, grow to encompass many more. I imagine this lab as a gathering place for curious people who want to think about systems, and not in the typical mechanistic way they are described and implemented in technology. Instead, we'll feel into living systems, fractal ways of being, where the how is as important as the what. Over time, I hope the Lab will be a home or a waypoint for designers, researchers, community organizations, artists, storytellers, and technologists to explore togetherness together. Our 'theory of change' focuses on paradigm shift. Big change takes practice and possibility. Paradoxically, paradigm shift is a result of many small changes and repetitions in our behaviour and belief systems. We embrace emergence, mutual support, collective practice, and storytelling. One thing feels pretty clear, we need technology that is designed in solidarity with mutual care, does not depend on the whims of big corporations or its surveillance, and is joyful to use. To live in this reality, we also need to consider how business, funding, governance, scale, and context affect our work. We need embodied ways of knowing and sharing knowledge alongside our technical reasoning. And we need to face the reality of the consequences of our actions and those of our ancestors. This is not a project that aims to solve all the world's problems, but instead, to nurture the capacity for doing things together. We support and practice responding with curiosity and care, not with answers or attachment to ideals that no longer make sense amid collapsing systems. We are not "hiring" for this project now but there are many ways to get involved and would welcome opportunities to collaborate. Some of the projects we're holding include Folk Tech, Spacious, SEED Founding, and Relational Source License. We're also developing a very cool workshop process to help other organizations explore relational design through a community-driven futurism process. As ecosystem supporters, we are developing relationships with many aligned groups and projects as well. There will be more communications coming! If this all sounds like something you would like to support, contribute to, keep track of, or develop relationship with, for now you can subscribe to our calendar here https://lnkd.in/gPRFW7zC and message me directly! | 19 comments on LinkedIn

Design Thinking

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation’s terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking—a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser Permanente and Brown’s firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care, and a happier nursing staff. Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked roads had overshadowed people’s happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a brand concept—“Coasting”—to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting bikes. [hbr_brightcove id=”4443548301001″]

Civic Health Project

Technology can connect or divide us. At Civic Health Project, we're dedicated to advancing massively scalable solutions to society's dangerous divisions.

Social Uses of Personal Health Information Within PatientsLikeMe, an Online Patient Community: What Can Happen When Patients Have Access to One Another’s Data

Background: This project investigates the ways in which patients respond to the shared use of what is often considered private information: personal health data. There is a growing demand for patient access to personal health records. The predominant model for this record is a repository of all clinically relevant health information kept securely and viewed privately by patients and their health care providers. While this type of record does seem to have beneficial effects for the patient–physician relationship, the complexity and novelty of these data coupled with the lack of research in this area means the utility of personal health information for the primary stakeholders—the patients—is not well documented or understood. Objective: PatientsLikeMe is an online community built to support information exchange between patients. The site provides customized disease-specific outcome and visualization tools to help patients understand and share information about their condition. We begin this paper by describing the components and design of the online community. We then identify and analyze how users of this platform reference personal health information within patient-to-patient dialogues. Methods: Patients diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) post data on their current treatments, symptoms, and outcomes. These data are displayed graphically within personal health profiles and are reflected in composite community-level symptom and treatment reports. Users review and discuss these data within the Forum, private messaging, and comments posted on each other’s profiles. We analyzed member communications that referenced individual-level personal health data to determine how patient peers use personal health information within patient-to-patient exchanges. Results: Qualitative analysis of a sample of 123 comments (about 2% of the total) posted within the community revealed a variety of commenting and questioning behaviors by patient members. Members referenced data to locate others with particular experiences to answer specific health-related questions, to proffer personally acquired disease-management knowledge to those most likely to benefit from it, and to foster and solidify relationships based on shared concerns. Conclusions: Few studies examine the use of personal health information by patients themselves. This project suggests how patients who choose to explicitly share health data within a community may benefit from the process, helping them engage in dialogues that may inform disease self-management. We recommend that future designs make each patient’s health information as clear as possible, automate matching of people with similar conditions and using similar treatments, and integrate data into online platforms for health conversations.