Factors influencing the implementation of digital health within primary care settings. A systematic review

PI Title: Dr Jamie Ross

Lead member: QMUL

Digital health interventions (DHIs) are defined as health services delivered electronically and are increasingly becoming part of our healthcare systems. Examples of DHIs include electronic medical records, mobile applications or wearable sensors for remote monitoring or technologies that allow remote consultations.

The promise of DHIs include cost and time savings and improving quality and access of services for patients. However, DHIs have often been difficult to roll out successfully within the NHS, and not much is known about how to best do this in primary care.

Primary care services provide the first point of contact in the healthcare system, acting as the 'front door' of the NHS. Primary care includes general practice, community pharmacy, dental services. In recent years, and in response to the covid 19 pandemic, primary care has seen a big move towards using DHIs, however little is known about what helps or hinders this or what strategies are useful in getting DHIs are taken up and used.

One way to get a better understanding of how these DHIs can be introduced and used as intended is to look at examples of how this has been done previously and identify strengths and weaknesses in their approaches.
Working with our partners, including our patient and public contributors, we plan to conduct a “systematic review”. This type of research is a thorough and detailed review of existing literature on a particular topic. In this case, the review will consider how the factors that help or hinder the implementation of DHIs in primary care settings and the strategies that might be successful in supporting this.

We will systematically search, identify, select, appraise, and summarise the research evidence on this topic. In doing this, we will determine, map and describe key concepts within the evidence as well as gaps for further research.
The information we get from our research will help support how DHIs are implemented within primary care settings. This will be useful to other researchers developing DHIs, for clinicians (such as GPs) who are tasked with using DHIs and for policy makers who make decisions about which DHIs to promote.

We will also use the findings of this study to help us develop an application for future funding to explore in more detail the challenges of DHIs within primary care in the NHS.

Amount awarded: £49,893