Key Intervention Characteristics in e-Health: Steps Towards Standardized Communication

PURPOSE: This paper reports expert opinion on e-health intervention characteristics that enable effective communication of characteristics across the diverse field of e-health interventions. The paper presents a visualization tool to support communication of the defining characteristics. METHODS: An initial list of e-health intervention characteristics was developed through an iterative process of item generation and discussion among the 12 authors. The list was distributed to 123 experts in the field, who were emailed an invitation to assess and rank the items. Participants were asked to evaluate these characteristics in three separate ways. RESULTS: A total of 50 responses were received for a response rate of 40.7%. Six respondents who reported having little or no expertise in e-health research were removed from the dataset. Our results suggest that 10 specific intervention characteristics were consistently supported as of central importance by the panel of 44 e-intervention experts. The weight and perceived relevance of individual items differed between experts; oftentimes, this difference is a result of the individual theoretical perspective and/or behavioral target of interest. CONCLUSIONS: The first iteration of the visualization of salient characteristics represents an ambitious effort to develop a tool that will support communication of the defining characteristics for e-health interventions aimed to assist e-health developers and researchers to communicate the key characteristics of their interventions in a standardized manner that facilitates dialog.