#eHealthPromotion, #SaluteSocial

Devices and programs using digital technology to foster or support behavior change (digital interventions) are increasingly ubiquitous, being adopted for use in patient diagnosis and treatment, self-management of chronic diseases, and in primary prevention. They have been heralded as potentially revolutionizing the ways in which individuals can monitor and improve their health behaviors and health care by improving outcomes, reducing costs, and improving the patient experience. However, we are still mainly in the age of promise rather than delivery. Developing and evaluating these digital interventions presents new challenges and new versions of old challenges that require use of improved and perhaps entirely new methods for research and evaluation.

This article discusses these challenges and provides recommendations aimed at accelerating the rate of progress in digital behavior intervention research and practice. Areas addressed include intervention development in a rapidly changing technological landscape, promoting user engagement, advancing the underpinning science and theory, evaluating effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and addressing issues of regulatory, ethical, and information governance.

This article is the result of a two-day international workshop on how to create, evaluate, and implement effective digital interventions in relation to health behaviors. It was held in London in September 2015 and was supported by the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council (MRC), the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Methodology Research Programme (PI Susan Michie), and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of the United States (PI Kevin Patrick).

With regard to assessing and promoting engagement, a key conclusion was that sustained engagement is not always required and that for each intervention it is useful to establish what constitutes “effective engagement,” that is, sufficient engagement to achieve the intended outcomes.

In terms of governance, developers of digital behavior interventions should comply with existing regulatory frameworks, but with consideration for emerging standards around information governance, ethics, and interoperability.

New communications technology has the potential to both disrupt and enhance the pharmaceutical industry, but research shows that pharma often needs to up its game when it comes to the adoption of new technologies.

Mobile devices have transformed how we access and consume content, and are poised to make similarly huge changes to the way consider our health (read “The mHealth App Market is at the Saturation Point”; http://sco.lt/5thWGv). mHealth revenue is projected to reach 26 billion by 2017, and the number of health apps has doubled in just the past two years. Social is also likely to have a major impact in the way that pharma communicates in the coming years. 52% of physician’s surveyed by Deloitte in this research expressed interest in communicating with pharma companies via social media.

However, pharma currently lags behind other verticals for using social media. Pharma spending on digital advertising is far below that of other industries, and it still conducts most of it’s communications with physicians via traditional channels. There is big potential for new communications technology to make the pharmaceutical industry more efficient and more engaged with it’s customers. This infographic from Deloitte shows the potential for new digital technology to allow pharma to market itself more effectively.