Digital public health interventions address health promotion and prevention through digital media and tools.
The implementation of new digital technologies to improve public health interventions go through various evaluations to know and understand the problems they seek to solve. For this reason, there are different interventions with different purposes such as health promotion, management of health systems through new technologies, or disease prevention.
Public health organizations such as the World Health Organization or the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) have different approaches and frameworks for the use of Digital Health technologies. In these frameworks, they classify and describe the types of digital interventions in public health, always taking into account a user-centered approach.
A digital public health intervention addresses essential public health functions and has a target group to improve its implementation and acceptance among the population. Otherwise it would not be possible to achieve an impact on the health of the benefited group.
Researchers in Germany developed a new framework for digital health interventions taking into account parameters established by both NICE and WHO. For this they took into account three concepts, Digital Health and Electronic Health or eHealth, related to health care and management, and mobile health related to health prevention and promotion. These three concepts are key to understanding what a digital public health intervention is.
- Zeeb, a German specialist in Digital Health, recently published an article where he explains that a public health intervention: "focuses on the development, application and knowledge of interest in Public Health and therefore in prevention, health promotion and related basic sciences. like epidemiology. The primary clinical aspects and those related to the individual patient are not in the foreground, unlike, for example, telemedicine with its concrete application in a context of individual treatment and care”.
In this sense, the authors of a new intervention framework, after reviewing various resources such as those of NICE or the WHO, presented their own definition:
“A digital public health intervention addresses at least one essential public health function through digital means. The application of a functional classification and stratification framework categorizes their level of interaction with the user. The development process of a digital public health intervention includes the user perspective applying participatory methods to support its effectiveness and implementation with the aim of achieving an impact on the health of the population”
Learn more about this proposal at the following link:
