Health care delivery is undergoing a rapid change from traditional processes toward the use of digital health interventions and personalized medicine. This movement has been accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis as a response to the need to guarantee access to health care services while reducing the risk of contagion. Digital health scale-up is now also vital to achieve population-wide impact: it will only accomplish sustainable effects if and when deployed into regular health care delivery services. The question of how sustainable digital health scale-up can be successfully achieved has, however, not yet been sufficiently resolved. This paper identifies and discusses enablers and barriers for scaling up digital health innovations. The results discussed in this paper were gathered by scientists and representatives of public bodies as well as patient organizations at an international workshop on scaling up digital health innovations. Results are explored in the context of prior research and implications for future work in achieving large-scale implementations that will benefit the population as a whole.
Keywords: barriers; digital health; digital health services; enablers; health care delivery; health interventions.
©Hannes Schlieter, Lisa A Marsch, Diane Whitehouse, Lena Otto, Ana Rita Londral, Gisbert Wilhelm Teepe, Martin Benedict, Joseph Ollier, Tom Ulmer, Nathalie Gasser, Sabine Ultsch, Bastian Wollschlaeger, Tobias Kowatsch. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 11.03.2022.