What are digital public health interventions? A scoping review of existing digital technologies and internet-based Interventions to maintain and improve the population's health (Preprint)

Abstract

Rapid developments and implementation of digital technologies in public health domains throughout the last decades changed the landscape of health delivery and disease prevention globally. A growing number of countries introduce interventions like online consultations, electronic health records, or telemedicine to their health systems to improve their populations' health and make access to health care more accessible. Despite multiple definitions for digital public health and the development of different digital interventions, no study has analyzed whether the used technologies fit the definition and the core characteristics of digital public health interventions. A scoping review is therefore needed to explore the extent of the literature on this topic.

The main aim of this scoping review is to outline real-world digital public health interventions on all levels of health care, prevention, and health. The second objective will be the mapping of reported intervention characteristics. These will include non-technical elements and the technical features of an intervention.

We searched for relevant literature in the following databases: PubMed, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. All original study types (observational studies, experimental trials, qualitative studies, and health-economic analyses), as well as governmental reports, books, book chapters, or conference papers, were included when the evaluation and description of a digital health intervention was their primary intervention component. Two authors screened the articles independently in three stages (title, abstract, and full-text). Two independent authors will also conduct the data charting. We will report our results following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews checklist.

The search in all three databases was conducted on 19th February 2021 and produced 18,363 results. We identified a total of 13,383 papers after deduplication. As of August 2021, the abstract screening stage is about to be complete, and we expect the full-text screening to start in September 2021. We assume to complete the review in January 2022.

To our knowledge, this will be the first scoping review to fill the theoretical definitions of digital public health with concrete interventions and their characteristics. Our scoping review will display the landscape of worldwide existing digital public health interventions that use information- and communication technologies. The results of this review will be published in a peer-reviewed journal in early 2022 and used as a blueprint for the development of future digital public health interventions.