Designing digital services for better patient health, care and well-being – what evidence do we have?

Abstract

Digital health services aim to improve care and health system performance, offering new opportunities for delivering health and social care (from prevention and health promotion to curative interventions, rehabilitation and self-management). Whether or not digital health services really provide better health outcomes and contribute to the sustainability of health systems depends to a high degree on how they are designed and implemented in a given context. Apart from the quality of design and implementation processes, systematic assessment and evaluation of digital health services is needed. To date, such evaluations are relatively scarce and difficult to generalize. Nevertheless, there exists a lot of evidence in form of design guidelines for certain digital health services, literature on unintended consequences of health information technology and assessment indicators for eHealth implementation. This keynote will draw upon the available evidence, illustrated by case studies from different research projects.