JMIR Formative Research

Preventive interventions to delay substance use disorder (SUD) are ideally delivered during early adolescence, a critical period for exposure to substance use (SU) risk factors. Young teens (aged 12-14 years) engaging in occasional use of alcohol, cannabis, or tobacco use, or with a family history of SUD, are at increased risk for SUD. Although behavioral-ecological family therapy is effective for prevention, many families face access barriers. Single-session interventions (SSIs) may offer an accessible, low-intensity alternative.

Off-label drug prescribing is prevalent across medicine, including psychiatry, often due to unmet therapeutic needs and inadequate responses to standard treatments. The PSYHAMM (Psychotropes Hors Autorisation de Mise sur le Marché) project, funded by the French Research Agency, investigates these practices. To support this research, a clinical data warehouse (CDW) with advanced data analysis tools was developed and deployed. This system integrates both structured and unstructured data from electronic health records, facilitating comprehensive data analysis. The goal is to improve understanding, regulation, and safety of off-label drug use in psychiatry by providing insights into prescribing patterns and their impacts, ultimately contributing to better clinical guidelines and patient care.

Although social media is often viewed by residents and could be used to reinforce teaching points, there is little data on methods that improve engagement in learning medical topics while socially perusing this medium.

In Japan, the 2021 revision to the Medical Practitioners Act formally supported students’ participation in supervised clinical practice. However, monitoring day-to-day clinical experiences across community-based clerkship sites remains challenging. Student-reported digital daily logs and reflection sheets provide complementary descriptive information across such sites.

Multiple studies have highlighted the prevalence of suboptimal dietary patterns during pregnancy and the postpartum period, with some studies indicating factors that influence dietary behaviors.

Depression, anxiety, and stress-related difficulties represent a major global health burden. Online psychological therapy has emerged as a promising approach to increasing access to care, yet evidence from routine, real-world clinical settings, particularly for services delivered without standardized treatment protocols, remains limited.

Remote vital sign monitoring of acute hospital at home (aHAH) patients is recommended in policy without clear guidance on implementation. While such monitoring has the potential to improve patient care, there is limited evidence for its feasibility and acceptability.

Mobile health technologies offer scalable opportunities to support home-based exercise programs. However, most commercially available apps are not tailored to individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) and have rarely been evaluated for usability and implementation outcomes in this population.

In clinical settings, clinicians’ context-specific trust in AI is associated with individual factors. This is particularly relevant in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) screening, where diagnostic criteria are complex, heterogeneous, and inherently uncertain. Although some AI systems demonstrate high sensitivity, clinicians are not always convinced of their utility. Therefore, examining potential biases in context-specific trust and achieving well-calibrated trust are critical.

For endurance athletes, resting heart rate (RHR) is a well-known indicator of training load, physiological status, and readiness for upcoming training. Predicting the following day’s RHR would enable athletes and coaches to optimize training plans and make timely load adjustments.

Palliative care improves patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQoL) by delivering specialty-level management for cancer symptoms. Digital symptom monitoring programs (SMPs) improve patients’ HRQoL through early symptom identification during cancer care. Through complementary approaches, SMPs and palliative care align with symptom management theory by linking the patient-reported symptom experience with clinician recommendations for symptom management to improve health outcomes for patients with serious illness. While both SMPs and palliative care reduce health care use and improve survival through detection and treatment of cancer symptoms, few studies have attempted to integrate palliative care into SMPs for cancer symptom management.

Health literacy (HL) is a crucial determinant of population health; however, disparities persist in multilingual settings. In South Tyrol, Italy, where German- and Italian-speaking populations coexist within a unified health care system, HL disparities may reflect differences in language, culture, and digital engagement.