Implementation of digital health interventions in practice

Digital health interventions include an array of technologies which utilise digital and mobile technologies to support health and care system needs and span the spectrum from everyday technologies like mobile phones to the more specialist technologies such as augmented reality. Digital health technologies are increasingly used in health and care settings to support the delivery of services and models of care and are considered central to shifting paradigms from traditional, reactive models of care to newer, disruptive and transformational approaches. Implementing digital health interventions in practice can provide a powerful catalyst to empower patients, citizens and informal caregivers in health and care scenarios by providing them with a range of tools to facilitate meaningful contributions to their own healthcare experiences. However, reaching the much desired echelons of full-scale adoption and implementation of digital health interventions in practice is often not without its challenges, but can be achieved through appreciation of the contexts in which the interventions are to be deployed, understanding user needs, adopting considered and systematic approaches to implementation and reflecting on experiences from real-life implementation scenarios. In this chapter, we consider some strategies that can help guide successful implementation of digital health technologies by introducing some implementation frameworks that can be utilised during the design, development, deployment and evaluation of digital health technologies in practice. We also reflect on some successful implementation practices by drawing on relevant published examples of large-scale digital health intervention deployments.