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Many promising technological innovations in health and social care are characterized by nonadoption or abandonment by individuals or by failed attempts to scale up locally, spread distantly, or sustain the innovation long term at the organization or system level. Our objective was to produce an evidence-based, theory-informed, and pragmatic framework to help predict and evaluate the success of a technology-supported health or social care program. The study had 2 parallel components: (1) secondary research (hermeneutic systematic review) to identify key domains, and (2) empirical case studies of technology implementation to explore, test, and refine these domains. We studied 6 technology-supported programs-video outpatient consultations, global positioning system tracking for cognitive impairment, pendant alarm services, remote biomarker monitoring for heart failure, care organizing software, and integrated case management via data sharing-using longitudinal ethnography and action research for up to 3 years across more than 20 organizations. Data were collected at micro level (individual technology users), meso level (organizational processes and systems), and macro level (national policy and wider context). Analysis and synthesis was aided by sociotechnically informed theories of individual, organizational, and system change. The draft framework was shared with colleagues who were introducing or evaluating other technology-supported health or care programs and refined in response to feedback. The literature review identified 28 previous technology implementation frameworks, of which 14 had taken a dynamic systems approach (including 2 integrative reviews of previous work). Our empirical dataset consisted of over 400 hours of ethnographic observation, 165 semistructured interviews, and 200 documents. The final nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework included questions in 7 domains: the condition or illness, the technology, the value proposition, the adopter system (comprising professional staff, patient, and lay caregivers), the organization(s), the wider (institutional and societal) context, and the interaction and mutual adaptation between all these domains over time. Our empirical case studies raised a variety of challenges across all 7 domains, each classified as simple (straightforward, predictable, few components), complicated (multiple interacting components or issues), or complex (dynamic, unpredictable, not easily disaggregated into constituent components). Programs characterized by complicatedness proved difficult but not impossible to implement. Those characterized by complexity in multiple NASSS domains rarely, if ever, became mainstreamed. The framework showed promise when applied (both prospectively and retrospectively) to other programs. Subject to further empirical testing, NASSS could be applied across a range of technological innovations in health and social care. It has several potential uses: (1) to inform the design of a new technology; (2) to identify technological solutions that (perhaps despite policy or industry enthusiasm) have a limited chance of achieving large-scale, sustained adoption; (3) to plan the implementation, scale-up, or rollout of a technology program; and (4) to explain and learn from program failures.

Digital consultations between patients and clinicians increased markedly during the COVID-19 pandemic, raising questions about equity. This study aimed to review the literature on how multiple disadvantage-specifically, older age, lower socioeconomic status, and limited English proficiency-has been conceptualized, theorized, and studied empirically in relation to digital consultations. We focused mainly on video consultations as they have wider disparities than telephone consultations and relevant data on e-consultations are sparse. Using keyword and snowball searching, we identified relevant papers published between 2012 and 2022 using Ovid MEDLINE, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and PubMed. The first search was completed in July 2022. Papers meeting the inclusion criteria were analyzed thematically and summarized, and their key findings were tabulated using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative Research criteria. Explanations for digital disparities were critically examined, and a search was undertaken in October 2022 to identify theoretical lenses on multiple disadvantage. Of 663 articles from the initial search, 27 (4.1%) met our inclusion criteria. In total, 37% (10/27) were commentaries, and 63% (17/27) were peer-reviewed empirical studies (11/27, 41% quantitative; 5/27, 19% qualitative; 1/27, 4% mixed methods; 1/27, 4% systematic reviews; and 1/27, 4% narrative reviews). Empirical studies were mostly small, rapidly conducted, and briefly reported. Most studies (25/27, 93%) identified marked digital disparities but lacked a strong theoretical lens. Proposed solutions focused on identifying and removing barriers, but the authors generally overlooked the pervasive impact of multiple layers of disadvantage. The data set included no theoretically informed studies that examined how different dimensions of disadvantage combined to affect digital health disparities. In our subsequent search, we identified 3 theoretical approaches that might help account for these digital disparities. Fundamental cause theory by Link and Phelan addresses why the association between socioeconomic status and health is pervasive and persists over time. Digital capital theory by Ragnedda and Ruiu explains how people mobilize resources to participate in digitally mediated activities and services. Intersectionality theory by Crenshaw states that systems of oppression are inherently bound together, creating singular social experiences for people who bear the force of multiple adverse social structures. A limitation of our initial sample was the sparse and undertheorized nature of the primary literature. The lack of attention to how digital health disparities emerge and play out both within and across categories of disadvantage means that solutions proposed to date may be oversimplistic and insufficient. Theories of multiple disadvantage have bearing on digital health, and there may be others of relevance besides those discussed in this paper. We call for greater interdisciplinary dialogue between theoretical research on multiple disadvantage and empirical studies on digital health disparities.

Scotland-a country of 5.5 million people-has a rugged geography with many outlying islands, creating access challenges for many citizens. The government has long sought to mitigate these through a range of measures including an ambitious technology-enabled care program. A strategy to develop a nationwide video consultation service began in 2017. Our mixed methods evaluation was commissioned in mid-2019 and extended to cover the pandemic response in 2020. To draw lessons from a national evaluation of the introduction, spread, and scale-up of Scotland's video consultation services both before and during the pandemic. Data sources comprised 223 interviews (with patients, staff, technology providers, and policymakers), 60 hours of ethnographic observation (including in-person visits to remote settings), patient and staff satisfaction surveys (n=20,349), professional and public engagement questionnaires (n=5400), uptake statistics, and local and national documents. Fieldwork during the pandemic was of necessity conducted remotely. Data were analyzed thematically and theorized using the Planning and Evaluating Remote Consultation Services (PERCS) framework which considers multiple influences interacting dynamically and unfolding over time. By the time the pandemic hit, there had been considerable investment in material and technological infrastructure, staff training, and professional and public engagement. Scotland was thus uniquely well placed to expand its video consultation services at pace and scale. Within 4 months (March-June 2020), the number of video consultations increased from about 330 to 17,000 per week nationally. While not everything went smoothly, video was used for a much wider range of clinical problems, vastly extending the prepandemic focus on outpatient monitoring of chronic stable conditions. The technology was generally considered dependable and easy to use. In most cases (14,677/18,817, 78%), patients reported no technical problems during their postconsultation survey. Health care organizations' general innovativeness and digital maturity had a strong bearing on their ability to introduce, routinize, and expand video consultation services. The national-level groundwork before the pandemic allowed many services to rapidly extend the use of video consultations during the pandemic, supported by a strong strategic vision, a well-resourced quality improvement model, dependable technology, and multiple opportunities for staff to try out the video option. Scotland provides an important national case study from which other countries may learn.

Until COVID-19, implementation and uptake of video consultations in health care was slow. However, the pandemic created a “burning platform” for scaling up such services. As health care organizations look to expand and maintain the use of video in the “new normal,” it is important to understand infrastructural influences and changes that emerged during the pandemic and that may influence sustainability going forward. This study aims to draw lessons from 4 National Health Service (NHS) organizations on how information infrastructures shaped, and were shaped by, the rapid scale-up of video consultations during COVID-19. A mixed methods case study of 4 NHS trusts in England was conducted before and during the pandemic. Data comprised 90 interviews with 49 participants (eg, clinicians, managers, administrators, and IT support), ethnographic field notes, and video consultation activity data. We sought examples of infrastructural features and challenges related to the rapid scale-up of video. Analysis was guided by Gkeredakis et al’s 3 perspectives on crisis and digital change: as opportunity (for accelerated innovation and removal of barriers to experimentation), disruption (to organizational practices, generating new dependencies and risks), and exposure (of vulnerabilities in both people and infrastructure). Before COVID-19, there was a strong policy push for video consultations as a way of delivering health care efficiently. However, the spread of video was slow, and adopting clinicians described their use as ad hoc rather than business as usual. When the pandemic hit, video was rapidly scaled up. The most rapid increase in use was during the first month of the pandemic (March-April 2020), from an average of 8 video consultations per week to 171 per week at each site. Uptake continued to increase during the pandemic, averaging approximately 800 video consultations per week by March 2021. From an opportunity perspective, participants talked about changes to institutional elements of infrastructure, which had historically restricted the introduction and use of video. This was supported by an “organizing vision” for video, bringing legitimacy and support. Perspectives on disruption centered on changes to social, technical, and material work environments and the emergence of new patterns of action. Retaining positive elements of such change required a judicious balance between managerial (top-down) and emergent (bottom-up) approaches. Perspectives on exposure foregrounded social and technical impediments to video consulting. This highlighted the need to attend to the materiality and dependability of the installed base, as well as the social and cultural context of use. For sustained adoption at scale, health care organizations need to enable incremental systemic change and flexibility through agile governance and knowledge transfer pathways, support process multiplicity within virtual clinic workflows, attend to the materiality and dependability of the IT infrastructure within and beyond organizational boundaries, and maintain an overall narrative within which the continued use of video can be framed.

Background Action on smoking, obesity, excess alcohol, and physical inactivity in primary care is effective and cost-effective, but implementation is low. The aim was to examine the effectiveness of strategies to increase the implementation of preventive healthcare in primary care. Methods CINAHL, CENTRAL, The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Dissertations & Theses – Global, Embase, Europe PMC, MEDLINE and PsycINFO were searched from inception through 5 October 2023 with no date of publication or language limits. Randomised trials, non-randomised trials, controlled before-after studies and interrupted time series studies comparing implementation strategies (team changes; changes to the electronic patient registry; facilitated relay of information; continuous quality improvement; clinician education; clinical reminders; financial incentives or multicomponent interventions) to usual care were included. Two reviewers screened studies, extracted data, and assessed bias with an adapted Cochrane risk of bias tool for Effective Practice and Organisation of Care reviews. Meta-analysis was conducted with random-effects models. Narrative synthesis was conducted where meta-analysis was not possible. Outcome measures included process and behavioural outcomes at the closest point to 12 months for each implementation strategy. Results Eighty-five studies were included comprising of 4,210,946 participants from 3713 clusters in 71 cluster trials, 6748 participants in 5 randomised trials, 5,966,552 participants in 8 interrupted time series, and 176,061 participants in 1 controlled before after study. There was evidence that clinical reminders (OR 3.46; 95% CI 1.72–6.96; I 2  = 89.4%), clinician education (OR 1.89; 95% CI 1.46–2.46; I 2  = 80.6%), facilitated relay of information (OR 1.95, 95% CI 1.10–3.46, I 2  = 88.2%), and multicomponent interventions (OR 3.10; 95% CI 1.60–5.99, I 2  = 96.1%) increased processes of care. Multicomponent intervention results were robust to sensitivity analysis. There was no evidence that other implementation strategies affected processes of care or that any of the implementation strategies improved behavioural outcomes. No studies reported on interventions specifically designed for remote consultations. Limitations included high statistical heterogeneity and many studies did not account for clustering. Conclusions Multicomponent interventions may be the most effective implementation strategy. There was no evidence that implementation interventions improved behavioural outcomes. Trial registration PROSPERO CRD42022350912.

Establishing and running remote consultation services is challenging politically (interest groups may gain or lose), organizationally (remote consulting requires implementation work and new roles and workflows), economically (costs and benefits are unevenly distributed across the system), technically (excellent care needs dependable links and high-quality audio and images), relationally (interpersonal interactions are altered), and clinically (patients are unique, some examinations require contact, and clinicians have deeply-held habits, dispositions and norms). Many of these challenges have an under-examined ethical dimension. In this paper, we present a novel framework, Planning and Evaluating Remote Consultation Services (PERCS), built from a literature review and ongoing research. PERCS has 7 domains—the reason for consulting, the patient, the clinical relationship, the home and family, technologies, staff, the healthcare organization, and the wider system—and considers how these domains interact and evolve over time as a complex system. It focuses attention on the organization's digital maturity and digital inclusion efforts. We have found that both during and beyond the pandemic, policymakers envisaged an efficient, safe and accessible remote consultation service delivered through state-of-the art digital technologies and implemented via rational allocation criteria and quality standards. In contrast, our empirical data reveal that strategic decisions about establishing remote consultation services, allocation decisions for appointment type (phone, video, e-, face-to-face), and clinical decisions when consulting remotely are fraught with contradictions and tensions—for example, between demand management and patient choice—leading to both large- and small-scale ethical dilemmas for managers, support staff, and clinicians. These dilemmas cannot be resolved by standard operating procedures or algorithms. Rather, they must be managed by attending to here-and-now practicalities and emergent narratives, drawing on guiding principles applied with contextual judgement. We complement the PERCS framework with a set of principles for informing its application in practice, including education of professionals and patients.

Background The SUPPORT-HF2 randomised controlled trial compared telehealth technology alone with the same technology combined with centralised remote support, in which a clinician responds promptly to biomarker changes. The intervention was implemented differently in different sites; no overall impact was found on the primary endpoint (proportion of patients on optimum treatment). We sought to explain the trial’s findings in a qualitative evaluation. Methods Fifty-one people (25 patients, 3 carers, 18 clinicians, 4 additional researchers) were interviewed and observed in 7 UK trial sites in 2016–2018. We collected 110 pages of documents. The analysis was informed by the NASSS framework, a multi-level theoretical lens which considers non-adoption and abandonment of technologies by individuals and challenges to scale-up, spread and sustainability. In particular, we used NASSS to tease out why a ‘standardised’ socio-technical intervention played out differently in different sites. Results Patients’ experiences of the technology were largely positive, though influenced by the nature and severity of their illness. In each trial site, existing services, staffing levels, technical capacity and previous telehealth experiences influenced how the complex intervention of ‘telehealth technology plus centralised specialist remote support’ was interpreted and the extent to which it was adopted and used to its full potential. In some sites, the intervention was quickly mobilised to fill significant gaps in service provision. In others, it was seen as usefully extending the existing care model for selected patients. Elsewhere, the new model was actively resisted and the technology little used. In one site, centralised provision of specialist advice aligned awkwardly with an existing community-based heart failure support service. Conclusions Complex socio-technical interventions, even when implemented in a so-called standardised way with uniform inclusion and exclusion criteria, are inevitably implemented differently in different local settings because of how individual staff members interpret the technology and the trial protocol and because of the practical realities and path dependencies of local organisations. Site-specific iteration and embedding of a new technology-supported complex intervention may be required (in addition to co-design of the user interface) before such interventions are ready for testing in clinical trials. Trial registration BMC ISRCTN Registry 86212709 . Retrospectively registered on 5 September 2014

This article draws on research and clinical experience to discuss how and when to use video consultations in mental health settings. The appropriateness and impact of virtual consultations are influenced by the patient's clinical needs and social context, as well as by service-level socio-technical and logistical factors.

Requirements for physical distancing as a result of COVID-19 and the need to reduce the risk of infection prompted policy supporting rapid roll out of video consulting across the four nations of the UK—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Drawing on three studies of the accelerated implementation and uptake of video consulting across the four nations, we present a comparative and interpretive policy analysis of the spread and scale-up of video consulting during the pandemic. Data include interviews with 59 national level stakeholders, 55 health and social care staff and 30 patients, 20 national documents, responses to a UK-wide survey of NHS staff and analysis of routine activity data. Sampling ensured variations in geography, clinical context and adoption progress across the combined dataset. Comparative analysis was guided by theory on policy implementation and crisis management. The pandemic provided a “burning platform” prompting UK-wide policy supporting the use of video consulting in health care as a critical means of managing the risk of infection and a standard mode of provision. This policy push facilitated interest in video consulting across the UK. There was, however, marked variation in how this was put into practice across the four nations. Pre-existing infrastructure, policies and incentives for video consulting in Scotland, combined with a collaborative system-level approach, a program dedicated to developing video-based services and resourcing and supporting staff to deliver them enabled widespread buy-in and rapid spread. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, pre-existing support for digital health (e.g., hardware, incentives) and virtual care, combined with reduced regulation and “light touch” procurement managed to override some (but by no means all) cultural barriers and professional resistance to implementing digital change. In Northern Ireland and Wales, limited infrastructure muted spread. In all three countries, significant effort at system level to develop, review and run video consulting programs enabled a substantial number of providers to change their practice, albeit variably across settings. Across all four nations ongoing uncertainty, potential restructuring and tightening of regulations, along with difficulties inherent in addressing inequalities in digital access, raise questions about the longer-term sustainability of changes to-date.

Background There is growing interest in assisted living technologies to support independence at home. Such technologies should ideally be designed ‘in the wild’ i.e. taking account of how real people live in real homes and communities. The ATHENE (Assistive Technologies for Healthy Living in Elders: Needs Assessment by Ethnography) project seeks to illuminate the living needs of older people and facilitate the co-production with older people of technologies and services. This paper describes the development of a cultural probe tool produced as part of the ATHENE project and how it was used to support home visit interviews with elders with a range of ethnic and social backgrounds, family circumstances, health conditions and assisted living needs. Method Thirty one people aged 60 to 98 were visited in their homes on three occasions. Following an initial interview, participants were given a set of cultural probe materials, including a digital camera and the ‘Home and Life Scrapbook’ to complete in their own time for one week. Activities within the Home and Life Scrapbook included maps (indicating their relationships to people, places and objects), lists (e.g. likes, dislikes, things they were concerned about, things they were comfortable with), wishes (things they wanted to change or improve), body outline (indicating symptoms or impairments), home plan (room layouts of their homes to indicate spaces and objects used) and a diary. After one week, the researcher and participant reviewed any digital photos taken and the content of the Home and Life Scrapbook as part of the home visit interview. Findings The cultural probe facilitated collection of visual, narrative and material data by older people, and appeared to generate high levels of engagement from some participants. However, others used the probe minimally or not at all for various reasons including limited literacy, physical problems (e.g. holding a pen), lack of time or energy, limited emotional or psychological resources, life events, and acute illness. Discussions between researchers and participants about the materials collected (and sometimes about what had prevented them completing the tasks) helped elicit further information relevant to assisted living technology design. The probe materials were particularly helpful when having conversations with non-English speaking participants through an interpreter. Conclusions Cultural probe methods can help build a rich picture of the lives and experiences of older people to facilitate the co-production of assisted living technologies. But their application may be constrained by the participant’s physical, mental and emotional capacity. They are most effective when used as a tool to facilitate communication and development of a deeper understanding of older people’s needs.