Why did we undertake this study?
This scoping review was conducted to better understand how digital health technologies support patient empowerment in people with chronic diseases. Specifically, we aimed to identify which aspects of empowerment are enhanced by digital health technologies, and what barriers or facilitators influence this process.
What is the specific question(s) we wanted to answer?
We sought to answer three main questions:
What aspects of patient empowerment are most valued by people with chronic diseases when using DHTs?
How do DHTs support the empowerment of patients?
What factors influence the attainment of empowerment when using DHTs?
What did we find?
We identified nine recurring empowerment aspects, which were grouped into three overarching and interrelated empowerment dimensions supported by digital health technologies: health information and knowledge management, self-management, and emotional and social support.
Digital health technologies supported these empowerment dimensions through various functional components such as informing patients, allowing communication with the health care team, patient monitoring, behavior change interventions, individualized feedback, or peer support, each contributing to a varying degree.
The degree of empowerment varied based on personal, social, technological and environmental factors, including: demographic and socioeconomic status, digital literacy, disease status, perceived value of technology, sociocultural values and norms, doctor-patient relationship, connectivity, and cost influenced the development of empowering capabilities resulting from using DHTs.
What are the implications of our findings?
Our finding offers a patient-centered framework for understanding patient empowerment and its process. This framework can serve as a practical guide for technology developers in designing tools that genuinely empower patients, for researchers in evaluating digital interventions through an empowerment-oriented lens, and for healthcare stakeholders in promoting equitable and meaningful patient participation in care.
Original article: Empowering capabilities of people with chronic condition in the context of digital health technologies: a scoping review, Fomo M., Borga L.G., Abel T., Santangelo P.S., Riggare S., Klucken J., Paccoud I., J Med Internet Res 2025;27:e68458, doi: 10.2196/68458, PMID: 40577044, PMCID: 122547
More information:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40577044/