Just What the Doctor Ordered: Challenges with and Recommendations for the Implementation of Patients' Health Information from Mobile Applications into Swedish Health Care Organizations: The Health Care Professionals’ Perspective

Abstract

Health care systems around the world are striving to increase their levels of digitalization to reap the benefits of higher quality of care and lower costs. The Swedish health care system is one of them. Its interest in integrating patients’ health information from smartphone health applications would allow doctors and nurses to use the information in their consultations with patients, which could improve patient and population health. However, challenges often accompany the implementation of innovations in the health care sector. Therefore, this paper aims to discover and mitigate challenges that doctors and nurses foresee would accompany the use of health application information in their work with patients. Using the perspective of doctors and nurses is important due to their impact on the success of the integration of health application information into the Swedish health care system. To fulfill the purpose, semi-structured interviews with Swedish doctors and nurses were held to grasp if they are willing to use health application information in their consultations with patients and which challenges they foresee with its use. The interviews were coded using grounded theory, and four challenges came to light. A literature review for each of the challenges was conducted to gain insight into how to best mitigate each challenge. This led to the development of recommendations on how to mitigate each of the four challenges that the doctors and nurses highlighted in the interviews. The four challenges that would accompany nurses and doctors' use of health application information are that they are resistant to change, that there is a concern about the existing IT systems and if patient information security can be ensured, that they would need to evaluate the correctness and relevance of the information from the health applications, and that they have a lack of time. Recommendations on how to solve these challenges include the formation of guiding coalitions, investment in blockchain technology, integration of applications that relate to different disease areas, and ensuring that the information is easy for doctors and nurses to use.