Development of an internet-delivered program and platform for the treatment of depression and anxiety in patients with ischemic heart disease in eMindYourHeart

Abstract

Objective: To design and evaluate a mental health treatment program and internet-based delivery platform for patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) attending cardiac rehabilitation with the aim of reducing the risks associated with anxiety and/or depression. Participants: Patients diagnosed with IHD and comorbid anxiety and/or depression. Methods: Participatory design of treatment program and internet platform through staged inclusion of participants in two groups. Group 1 was enrolled as coresearchers with prolonged engagement in the project. Group 2 participated only in the pilot evaluation workshop. Results: Three patients were included in Group 1, two patients in Group 2. Inclusion of patients proved challenging, but the extended collaboration with co-researchers yielded valuable circumstantial insight and resulted in the design of a novel nine module treatment program. Additionally, the inclusion of two participant groups helped shape the development of an internet platform based on an open source content management system. Conclusion: Our grouped participation method contributes with several recommendations and reflections of advantages of this approach.Collaboration with co-researchers helped us gain a deeper understanding of the impact of language on self-perception and potential stigma. Prolonged participation led to a higher level of trust and familiarity, which enabled uncovering of issues otherwise hidden.

Methods for Human-Centered eHealth Development: Narrative Scoping Review

“…Furthermore, some focus groups included a single type of stakeholder, for example, only patients, whereas others included a combination of multiple stakeholders such as therapists, patients, and technology developers. In addition, some studies included novel participants in each focus group, whereas others used recurring coresearchers [ 90 ]. As can be seen in Table 1 , focus groups were used throughout all phases of the development process.…”

“…Focus groups can be used in a sequential way: multiple focus groups can be conducted in a row and the goal and content of each focus group can be based on the outcomes of the previous focus groups. However, this iterative approach was said to be quite time consuming for researchers and participants [ 33 , 54 , 64 , 82 , 84 - 86 , 90 , 92 ]. Third, to ensure that valuable information for eHealth development is gathered, the content and form of focus groups need to be adapted, based on the topic and target group [ 39 - 41 , 51 , 55 , 61 , 87 ].…”

“…As conducting development processes in practice is often very complex and challenging, multiple authors recommended forming a multidisciplinary development team. Such a team can consist of, for example, researchers, patients, health care providers, technology developers, designers, and managers [ 15 , 88 , 90 ]. A multidisciplinary team can prevent a top-down approach and tunnel vision; ensure that a constant eye is kept on the context; facilitate the coordination of large, complex development processes by combining skills and knowledge; and even support implementation of the to-be-developed eHealth technology in practice [ 182 ].…”

User innovation rings the bell for new horizons in e-health: a bibliometric analysis

“…Thus, UI strategy for new product and service development is applied differently in this special setting and a critical and insightful question is who the users participating in UI are in e-health innovations. The results of coding the users involved in the 169 sample publications show that they fall into one of the following seven categories:Patients or persons related to a specific disease in different stages such as under-treatment patients, cured patients, screened patients or patients in remedy (Leite and Hodgkinson, 2021; Schmidt et al. , 2021; Quintana et al.…”

“…2.2 User innovation in healthcare over time UI has been extensively applied over the last decades in different healthcare contexts ranging from clinical experiments (Svensson and Hartmann, 2018) to natural language processing and sentiment analysis (Petersen et al, 2020), passing through pharmaceutics (Smits and Boon, 2008), mental healthcare (Schmidt et al, 2021), cancer treatments (Poncette et al, 2020) and orthopedics (Goldchmit et al, 2021). Moving from an early stage, in which physicians and health professionals played the main role (Lettl, 2007;Lettl et al, 2006Lettl et al, , 2008, the end users, in particular patients and their non-medical caregivers, have become the core targets of the collaboration in the late stages of the innovation process (Biswas et al, 2008;Habicht et al, 2013).…”