Mohammadhiwa Abdekhoda, Department of Medical Library and Information Sciences, School of Health Management and Medical Informatics, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran. Email: moc.liamg@adohkedbaawiH
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022sj-pdf-1-jrn-10.1177_17449871221077080 – Supplemental Material for Adopting mobile health applications by nurses: a scoping review
GUID: AB99E5D7-8F12-4B9A-960E-E4E3340D7720Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-jrn-10.1177_17449871221077080 for Adopting mobile health applications by nurses: a scoping review by Soghra nezamdoust, Mohammadhiwa Abdekhoda, Fatemeh Ranjbaran, and Saber Azami-Aghdash in Journal of Research in Nursing
The concept of mobile health has attracted considerable attention across the globe, as it provides both healthcare professionals and patients with a distinct means of information and resources.
This study was conducted with the aim of utilising mobile health (mHealth) applications by nurses and presenting a scenario of how and why they are utilised.
This study was a scoping review. Data collection was carried out by searching the related keywords in Google Scholar, Scopus, Cochrane, EMBASE, Ovid, and PubMed databases from January 2000 to March 2019.
Regarding the reasons for using mobile applications by nurses, five objectives were identified, including learning and knowledge enhancement, treatment and improvement of the patient care process, diagnostic process, data and patient management, and health promotion. Effective factors in the nurses’ use of mobile applications were categorised into eight themes: ease of use, usefulness, security and confidentiality, feasibility and functionality, design and use—interface, effectiveness, infrastructure, versatility, and social norms.
Mobile health applications have considerable potential in enhancing nurses’ professional activities. This study contributes to both nursing and health policy by providing a scenario of how and why nurses use mobile health applications.
Keywords: application, mobile, mobile health applications, nurseWith the advent of commercialised phones in the year 1983, cell phone technology has spread with unprecedented speed (DeGusta, 2012). Miniaturisation along with advances in sensors, batteries, and computational technologies has resulted in the release of the first collection of smart-phones in 2007 and tablets 1 year later. Both devices are able to independently run software programs known as applications. This issue has changed the role of these devices to beyond simple telephone communication (Johnston et al., 2015). Like any other computer, a mobile has a variety of different software applications. In the mobile application market, the term “application” or App, for short, is more common than the term software and this expression has the same meaning as software application, which is known as the mobile application or mobile software. One of the common methods used today to obtain health information are through the use of mobile applications (Mobasheri et al., 2015).
These technologies have created a revolution in people’s lives and led to a great interest in their utilisation in the healthcare industry. In healthcare, mHealth is defined as providing health services by using transportable communication devices (Whittaker, 2012). By using mHealth, the majority of these programs are made available to users, indirectly, and result in improving a healthy lifestyle or empowering patients to manage conditions of their disease. Nevertheless, a growing number of applications has been designed which are specifically for professional healthcare use in the clinical environment in order to increase efficiency regarding design-related tasks (Mobasheri et al., 2015).
Mobile phones’ distinctiveness, portability, and ability to connect to healthcare specialists help them to access health-related content at practically any time or place (Ozdalga et al., 2012). A reliable healthcare institute, such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in England has provided access to most of its regulations for physicians in the form of applications in order to facilitate decision-making. Regardless of the enthusiasm towards digital health, errors exist, and numerous studies have shown the potential of some applications in creating injury for patients (Haffey et al., 2013; Mobasheri et al., 2014; Wolf et al., 2013). In addition, the use of mobile phones in the clinical domain has created specific safety and privacy concerns, which should be considered to overcome risks of violations in the patients’ highly sensitive diagnostic and personal data (Hagbaghery et al., 2004; Martínez-Pérez et al., 2015).
Among the medical staff, nurses have a direct responsibility in maintaining the health of individuals and are in close contact with their patients. With this in mind, nurses have numerous important roles that include providing clinical care, consultation, follow-up of accurate treatment and teaching disease prevention methods (Hagbaghery et al., 2004). Nurses make up the largest group of health care providers and play a significant role in the continuity of healthcare, improving, and maintaining health at various levels of the healthcare system (Hagbaghery et al., 2004). On the other hand, as one of the key components in the healthcare system, nurses have a valuable role in educating patients because they have better access to the patients and their families and spend a great amount of time caring for them (Marcum et al., 2002; Sullivan and Decker, 1998). Continuous scientific advances along with the patients changing condition requires nurses to diagnose patients’ problems by integrating their technical skills and professional knowledge, and taking a step towards reducing errors and increasing the quality of healthcare by designing, implementing and evaluating the program. During the past few years, it has been found that nurses who based their services on reliable health information were able to make better decisions and provide higher quality healthcare services (Rahimi and AhmadianMajin, 2017).
Mobile health applications have a considerable potential in enhancing nurses’ professional activities and are mostly used by nurses for various reasons. However, as it was mentioned above, all of these applications have not been successful and worries still exist, such as compatibility with the nurses’ job and privacy and safety concerns. Until now, a number of studies have been carried out regarding the reasons for nurses’ use of mobile health applications and effective factors in their behaviour when using these applications. In this study, we evaluate issues such as the objective of these studies, the type of study, study population, use of mobile applications, explanations of mobile applications, effective factors in nurses’ use of these mobile applications, criteria reported for the assessment and evaluation of mobile health applications, and the results obtained from these studies.
The study was a scoping review and is presented using the PRISMA-ScR checklist (Tricco et al., 2018). The search was conducted in Google Scholar, Scopus, Cochrane, EMBASE, Ovid, and PubMed databases, without any limitation during the search. However, after retaining the articles, we considered a limit for date of publication between 2000 and 2019 and articles that were in this range were included in the study. The search was conducted based on the following keywords: “electronic, application, apps, app, clinical staff, nurse, nurses, smart-phone, smart phone, smart phone, cell phone, cellphone, tablet, mobile, device, mobile applications software.” A total of 2063 articles were retained. Three hundred and seventy-six articles were eliminated due to duplication among databases. Among the 1678 remaining articles, 151 articles published before the year 2000 were eliminated. Two hundred and fifty-nine items were excluded because they were books and another 152 articles were excluded due to incomplete information. Finally, 739 articles remained for which the initial evaluation was done based on article title. After this evaluation based on the abstracts, 693 irrelevant articles were excluded, leaving a number of 46 articles. 21 of these articles were eliminated from the study due to the type of articles including brief communication, protocol, commentary, and feature. Ultimately, the 25 remaining articles were included in the study. The search and inclusion process are provided in Figure 1 (Tricco et al., 2018).