Developing and Assessing Digital Public Health Interventions: A Comprehensive Framework
About this framework
Purpose and scope of the framework
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. These criteria are 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.
While the first version of the framework comprised of 13 domains and 210 questions, the revised version 1.1 only consists of 12 domains and 182 questions. The 12 Domains are: 1) Health Conditions and Current Public Health Interventions, 2) Technical Aspects, 3) Usability, 4) Infrastructure and Organization, 5) Implementation, 6) Intended and Unintended Health-related Effects, 7) Social, Cultural and Intersectional Aspects, 8) Ethics 9) Legal and Regulatory, 10) Data Security and Data Protection, 11) Cost and Economics, and 12) Sustainability.
As the field of Digital Public Health is rapidly evolving, the framework has been designed as a living framework and will be revised continuously as technology advances.
The current and all past versions of the framework can be found at the Open Science Framework (OSF) under https://osf.io/ub3w4
Authors:
Chen-Chia Pan, Nuria Pedros Barnils, Dorothee Jürgens, Saskia Muellmann, Sarah Janetzki, Jonathan Kolschen, Merle Freye, Hans-Henrik Dassow, Oliver Lange, Wolf Rogowski, Anke Reinschluessel, 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.; Rogowski, W.; Reinschluessel, A.; Forberger, S.; Jahnel, T.; Schüz, B.; Gerhardus, A. (2023) Developing and Assessing Digital Public Health Interventions: A Digital Public Health Framework (DigiPHrame) Version 1.1. Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health, Bremen. 6/2023
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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.