Characteristics of Smartphone Applications for Nutrition Improvement in Community Settings: A Scoping Review

Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press https://academic.oup.com Copyright © 2019 American Society for NutritionSmartphone applications are increasingly being used to support nutrition improvement in community settings. However, there is a scarcity of practical literature to support researchers and practitioners in choosing or developing health applications. This work maps the features, key content, theoretical approaches, and methods of consumer testing of applications intended for nutrition improvement in community settings. A systematic, scoping review methodology was used to map published, peer-reviewed literature reporting on applications with a specific nutrition-improvement focus intended for use in the community setting. After screening, articles were grouped into 4 categories: dietary self-monitoring trials, nutrition improvement trials, application description articles, and qualitative application development studies. For mapping, studies were also grouped into categories based on the target population and aim of the application or program. Of the 4818 titles identified from the database search, 64 articles were included. The broad categories of features found to be included in applications generally corresponded to different behavior change support strategies common to many classic behavioral change models. Key content of applications generally focused on food composition, with tailored feedback most commonly used to deliver educational content. Consumer testing before application deployment was reported in just over half of the studies. Collaboration between practitioners and application developers promotes an appropriate balance of evidence-based content and functionality. This work provides a unique resource for program development teams and practitioners seeking to use an application for nutrition improvement in community settings

A Systematic Analysis of Patient Portals Adoption, Acceptance and Usage: The Trajectory for Triple Aim?

Personal Health Records (PHR), often known as patient portal, are consumer-centric tools that can strengthen consumers’ ability to actively manage their own health and healthcare. The incorporation of patient portals provides the promise to assist with Triple Aim and population health goals. Patient portals encourage patients to play a more active role in their healthcare by giving them more responsibility for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and managing chronic diseases and thus may provide a cost-effective way to improve quality of care. In this study, we extend the existing literature by using a data analytic approach to provide more insights in adopting mobile patient portals. Specifically, we aim to use topic modeling approach, LDA algorithm, to systematically analyze users’ feedback (i.e., online users’ reviews) from the actual use of a common mobile patient portal, Epic’s MyChart. To validate the extracted topics, we compared the results of LDA analysis with that of human analysis. Overall, the extracted topics revealed opportunities for improvement and to enhance the design of current basic portals to improve usage. Improved portal usage will move toward effective population health management and achievement of the triple aim goals

Enhancing diabetes self-management through mobile phone application

Mary Adu adopted a systematic health behavioural framework and user engagement process to develop and explore the efficacy of a novel mobile-phone app for diabetes self-management. Reported benefits of the app provide empirical evidence of support for its multi-feature functionality and comprehensive interventional role in diabetes self-management education and support