Developing and Assessing Digital Public Health Interventions: A Comprehensive Framework

About this framework
Purpose and scope of the framework
1st version, 7/2022
Public Health aims to promote and enhance the health status of individuals and communities through collective societal efforts. Recently, several digital technologies have emerged, pursuing the same goal, developing a novel concept: Digital Public Health. Given the rapidly increasing number of health-related digital technologies, a systematic framework is necessary to assess their values from a public health perspective.
The present framework aims to assist developers, evaluators, policymakers and researchers in the systematic development and evaluation of digital public health interventions in public health by providing a comprehensive overview of criteria to assess digital public health interventions.
The framework comprises a set of criteria framed as open-ended questions clustered within domains that will lead interested parties through a broad spectrum of crucial elements when developing and evaluating digital public health interventions.
In total, it consists of 210 questions, structured by 13 domains: 1) Health Conditions and Current Public Health Interventions, 2) Functionality of the Health Technologies, 3) Software Properties, 4) Human-Computer Interaction, 5) Infrastructure and Organization, 6) Implementation 7) Health-related Effects, 8) Social, Cultural and Gender Aspects, 9) Cost and Economics, 10) Legal and Regulatory, 11) Ethics, 12) Data Security and Data Protection, and 13) Sustainability.
Here you can download the complete framework.
Authors:
Chen-Chia Pan, Nuria Pedros Barnils, Dorothee Jürgens, Saskia Muellmann, Sarah Janetzki, Jonathan Kolschen, Merle Freye, Hans-Henrik Dassow, Oliver Lange, Sarah Forberger, Tina Jahnel, Benjamin Schüz, Ansgar Gerhardus
PLEASE CITE THIS PUBLICATION AS:
Pan, C. C. ; Pedros Barnils, N.; Jürgens, D.; Muellmann, S.; Janetzki, S.; Kolschen, J.; Freye, M.; Dassow, H. H.; Lange, O.; Forberger, S.; Jahnel, T.; Schüz, B.; Gerhardus, A. (2022) Developing and assessing Digital Public Health Interventions: A comprehensive framework. 1st version. Leibniz Science Campus Digital Public Health, Bremen. 7/2022
We welcome feedback. Please contact us: framework(@)lsc-digital-public-health.de
Currently, there are frameworks that systematically assess the use of health-related technologies such as the Health Technology Assessment Core Model (Lampe et al. 2009, EUnetHTA 2016), frameworks on digital health (without considering specifically public health) and frameworks on public health. Given the rapidly increasing digital technologies designed for public health interventions, a framework for digital public health interventions is deemed necessary. The current framework aims to be comprehensive; therefore, users need not draw on multiple frameworks for their assessments. Among others it considers technical aspects as well as e.g. issues around implementation, ethics or data security.