BACKGROUND
Effective decision-making plays a crucial role in healthcare, directly impacting the quality of care and overall health outcomes. Digital nudging has emerged as a novel intervention that leverages behavioral economics and digital technology to guide people's decision-making processes in healthcare.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of this systematic review is to investigate the utilization and efficacy of digital nudging in healthcare, as well as their impacts on care quality and health outcomes.
METHODS
To assess the impacts of digital nudging on decision-making in study, encompassing PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, spanned from January 1, 2018, to April 15, 2023. Additionally, we performed an analysis to evaluate the potential role of digital nudging in healthcare. To ensure effective categorization of digital nudging strategies, we classified them into four distinct groups, taking into account two key factors: the intended purpose of the digital nudging (guidance or limitation) and the decision-making mode of the participants (enhancing motivation or increasing acceptability of the behavior).
RESULTS
29 out of the 35 included studies (82.86%) significantly influenced participant behavior. After excluding studies assessed as high risk, an even larger percentage (90.9%) of studies demonstrated that digital nudging strategies improved care outcomes and clinical decision making. In particularly, digital nudging strategies that made participants more receptive to the behavior by setting default options, for example, were more effective in bringing about behavioral changes.
CONCLUSIONS
The implementation of digital nudging has been shown to be an effective strategy for improving decision-making in the healthcare scenarios. By employing the proposed classification framework, this study offers valuable insights into the essential factors that should be taken into account while designing digital nudging strategies, thereby assisting policymakers in this domain.