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. 2023 Apr 21;18(4):e0284448.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284448. eCollection 2023.

What do hospital-based health professionals need and expect from an mHealth app to support the first 1000 days of life? Results from a cross sectional study

Laura Brunelli  1 , Raffaella Dobrina  2 , Chiara De Vita  3 , Elena Mazzolini  4 , Giuseppa Verardi  2 , Sofia Bussolaro  1 , Maura Degrassi  2 , Giulia Hervatich  2 , Maria Piazza  2 , Tamara Strajn  2 , Andrea Cassone  2 , Anja Starec  3 , Giuseppe Ricci  1   5 , Sara Zanchiello  3 , Tamara Stampalija  1   6
Affiliations

What do hospital-based health professionals need and expect from an mHealth app to support the first 1000 days of life? Results from a cross sectional study

Laura Brunelli et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Background: Several attempts have been made to introduce mHealth solutions to support maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH). However, most of the available apps do not meet the needs of end-users, underscoring the urgency of involving them in the co-design of telehealth interventions.

Objective: With this in mind, we investigated the needs and expectations of hospital-based health professionals (i.e., secondary users) providing care to pregnant women and new mothers with their babies for a hypothetical mHealth app to support the first 1000 days of life.

Methods: From November 2021 to March 2022, we surveyed health professionals using a questionnaire that explored the perceived importance of specific content, functionalities, and technical features of the proposed app. We also collected sociodemographic information from secondary users. We performed descriptive analysis and then used Ward hierarchical clustering method to classify respondents according to their response patterns.

Results: We recorded the needs and expectations of 145 hospital-based health professionals from obstetrics/gynecology, nursery/neonatology, and pediatrics. We found general agreement with the proposed content of the app, particularly general information about health during pregnancy (92%) and potential risky infections during pregnancy (91%). Three clusters emerged from the analysis, with the high and medium demanding clusters rating the importance of app content and technical features as very high and high, respectively, while low demanding cluster expressing more skepticism, especially about some of the proposed functionalities of the app.

Conclusions: Assessing the needs and expectations of end-users is an essential process for developing tailored and effective mHealth solutions. This study has shown that hospital-based health professionals generally recognize the value of the proposed app, suggesting their propensity to integrate such a telehealth solution into mainstream clinical practice.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Distribution of health professionals’ opinions on the contents, functionalities, and technical features of an mHealth app to support the first 1000 days of life, grouped by the six questionnaire domains.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Distribution of health professionals’ responses by cluster (i.e., high, medium, and low demanding clusters) for each questionnaire domain.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Distribution of clusters of health professionals (i.e., high, medium, and low demanding clusters) grouped by professional profile, working area, and years of work experience.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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