What Design Features Are Used in Effective e-Health Interventions? A Review Using Techniques from Critical Interpretive Synthesis

By Leanne G. Morrison, Lucy Yardley, John Powell, Susan Michie. Telemedicine journal and e-health, 2012

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The effectiveness of e-health interventions varies greatly. Despite this, there has been relatively little formal consideration of how differences in the design of an intervention (i.e., how the content is delivered) may explain why some interventions are more effective than others. This review primarily examines the use of the Internet to provide educational and self-management interventions to promote health. The article develops hypotheses about how the design of these interventions may be associated with outcomes. In total, 52 published reports from both a diversity sample and a representative sample were reviewed using techniques from Critical Interpretive Synthesis. Four core interactive design features were identified that may mediate the effects of intervention design on outcomes: Social context and support, contacts with intervention, tailoring, and self-management. A conceptual framework to summarize the design of e-health interventions delivered using the Internet is proposed. The framework provides a guide for systematic research to identify the effects of specific design features on intervention outcomes and to identify the mechanisms underlying any effects. To optimize the design of e-health interventions more work is needed to understand how and why these design features may affect intervention outcomes and to investigate the optimal implementation and dosage of each design feature.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24831a391537099469833381fcb1e0e14700e23c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

The Person-Based Approach to Intervention Development: Application to Digital Health-Related Behavior Change Interventions (2015, background): “We therefore try to ensure that prompts and notifications create a positive experience by incorporating new, additional intervention content that offers something useful or interesting to the individual users at the time it is received [70].”
Recommendations for policy and practice of telepsychotherapy and e-mental health in Europe and beyond. (2020, background): “Tailoring interventions to the needs of clients based on multiple constructs (which can be theoretical, behavioral, or demographic) could lead to greater effectiveness of e-health interventions (Morrison et al., 2012).”
Understanding and Promoting Effective Engagement With Digital Behavior Change Interventions. (2016, methodology): “For example, key design features of DBCIs identified by Morrison et al.(6) include social context and support, contacts with the intervention, tailoring, and self-management.”