JMIR Formative Research

The COVID-19 pandemic created new challenges to delivering safe and effective health care while minimizing virus exposure among staff and patients without COVID-19. Health systems worldwide have moved quickly to implement telemedicine in diverse settings to reduce infection, but little is understood about how best to connect patients who are acutely ill with nearby clinical team members, even in the next room.

Diabetes apps represent a promising addition to face-to-face self-management interventions, which can be time and resource intensive. However, few randomized controlled trials have evaluated the efficacy of diabetes apps, in particular as a stand-alone intervention without additional clinical support.

The global adoption of teleconsultation has been expedited as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. By allowing remote communication, teleconsultation may help limit the spread of the virus while maintaining the crucial patient-provider relationship.

Only 3% of Latina teens meet the national physical activity (PA) guidelines, and these habits appear to persist into adulthood. Developing effective interventions to increase PA in Latina teens is necessary to prevent disease and reduce disparities. Mobile technologies may be especially appropriate for this population, but mobile health (mHealth) intervention content must be designed in collaboration with the target population.

A cross-sectional study (Miyara et al, 2020) conducted by French researchers showed that the rate of current daily smoking was significantly lower in patients with COVID-19 than in the French general population, implying a potentially protective effect of smoking.

Parents and caregivers are generally recognized by literature and the law as key to child and adolescent mental health decisions. Digital interventions are increasingly being used to support care and treatment in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). However, evidence of the design and development process is generally not made available.

Early clinical experience during the COVID-19 pandemic has begun to elucidate that the disease can cause brain function changes that may result in compromised cognition both acutely and during variable recovery periods. Reports on cognitive assessment of patients with COVID-19 are often limited to orientation alone. Further assessment may seem to create an inappropriate burden for patients with acute COVID-19, which is characterized by fatigue and confusion, and may also compromise examiner safety.

The monitoring and management of chronic illness has always been a challenge. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) can be powerful tools for monitoring symptoms and guiding treatment of chronic diseases, but the available PROM tools are either too broad or too disease specific for the needs of a primary care practice focused on longitudinal care.

Although the incidence of breast cancer is lower in African-American women than in White women, African-American women have a decreased survival rate. The difference in survival rate may stem from poor endocrine therapy adherence, which increases breast cancer recurrence. Therefore, accessible and culturally sensitive interventions to increase endocrine therapy adherence are necessary.

In recent years, online disinformation has increased. Fake news has been spreading about the COVID-19 pandemic. Since January 2020, the culprits and antidotes to disinformation have been digital media and social media.

Knowledge of mental distress and resilience factors over the time span from before to after a stressor is important to be able to leverage the most promising resilience factors and promote mental health at the right time. To shed light on this topic, we designed the RESIST (Resilience Study) study, in which we assessed medical students before, during, and after their yearly exam period. Exam time is generally a period of notable stress among medical students, and it has been suggested that exam time triggers mental distress.

Since the emergence of COVID-19, health care workers and first responders have been at a high risk for mental health symptoms owing to their exposure to the virus and increased work stress during the pandemic. Although interventions exist to address mental health issues following exposure to disasters, emergencies, and humanitarian crises, considerably less is known about web-based unguided interventions to help mitigate the negative impacts of such events. Additionally, in contexts in which emergencies reduce access to in-person care, remote forms of support are critical, yet there are limited studies on the use of such interventions. Evidence-based, easy-to-use, scalable interventions are direly needed for this population.