JMIR Formative Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the crucial role of smartphone apps in public health, but it has also revealed challenges in terms of user acceptance and trust, as well as the secure integration of medical data. To overcome these, the COMPASS initiative (Coordination on Mobile Pandemic Apps Best Practice and Solution Sharing)—part of the German Network University Medicine (NUM) program—developed a structured framework for the coordinated development and delivery of pandemic apps, with a focus on usability, accessibility, security, and scalability. By incorporating expertise from 9 university hospitals and external partners, COMPASS provided a modular approach to pandemic app development that balances technology, regulation, and public acceptance. The framework includes governance, best practices, compliance, research compatibility, interoperability, and a scalable technology platform. In addition, standardized app components and templates were created to support an effective pandemic response. Real-world validation was provided by study-specific apps such as the Mainz Gutenberg Study COVID-19 app (University Medical Center Mainz) and the SentiSurv app (University Medical Center Mainz), which generated nearly 1 million data points from over 25,000 participants. COMPASS successfully developed study-specific apps, improved core functionalities, and contributed to larger digital health projects such as the InnovationHub CAEHR. Beyond its immediate applications, COMPASS serves as a scalable blueprint for future mobile health solutions, with a focus on data protection, user trust, and open-source collaboration. By integrating important technological, ethical, and user-oriented considerations, it sets a new standard for digital health innovation and ensures sustainable and widely accepted pandemic preparedness.

Uncertainty affects at least 20% of primary care consultations, possibly leading primary care physicians to order additional investigations or referrals, affecting cost-effectiveness and patient safety. Experience is a key determinant in making these orders, along with anxiety or physicians’ reactions to uncertainty. Past studies addressing the links between experience and additional investigations and referrals in uncertain situations have used questionnaires, database analyses, or interviews with general practitioners, but no study has used fully standardized conditions.

Ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) are an increasingly popular tool used to measure real-time symptom burden within mental health care, including for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, prior studies in the literature have been limited by brief assessment periods, high participant burden, and heterogeneity in both sampling and symptom assessment methodologies.

The period following discharge from psychiatric inpatient care represents a critical transition phase marked by heightened vulnerability to relapse, including increased risks of emergency department (ED) utilization. Understanding the risk factors for ED utilization after hospital discharge will help identify individuals who should be targeted for enhanced follow up care in the community.

Gait assessment is an important tool for evaluating health risks in older adults but remains underused in low-resource settings. We explored the feasibility of using a low-cost, simple walking protocol with smartphone video capture to extract health-related gait signals by classifying sex and age. Sex and age are fundamental biological factors linked to most health- and aging-related outcomes. Establishing baseline classification performance provides justification for future exploration of more complex health-related conditions using this protocol.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning, plus (LGBTQ+) youth experience significant health challenges relative to their peers, including higher rates of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health symptoms, partly due to minority stressors. Digital health interventions hold promise for addressing these issues, but their effectiveness hinges on human-centered co-design that ensures relevance and engagement.

Sustainment of evidence-based programs within dynamic health care environments requires ongoing adaptation to internal and external changes. Yet, strategies to support the sustainment of large-scale programs in heterogeneous settings are understudied. We developed and implemented a 3-phase participatory approach to support the sustainment of GRECC Connect, a 19-site Veterans Health Administration program that uses a hub-and-spoke model to expand rural access to geriatric specialty care.

Social media timelines contain rich signals of users’ mental states but are too voluminous for direct clinical review. Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate robust linguistic and summarization capabilities in general‑purpose tasks, distilling clinically relevant insights demands deeper psychological analysis and sensitivity to each individual’s unique personality and context. Accurately capturing subtle, personalized affective and behavioral patterns remains a significant challenge for current models. A thorough, systematic evaluation of LLM‑generated clinical summaries is therefore essential to understand their readiness for real‑world mental health monitoring.

With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in clinical documentation, it is unclear whether LLMs can faithfully reproduce specialty-specific writing styles and clinically meaningful documentation patterns observed in expert notes, particularly in psychiatry.

Mobile food apps have the potential to promote healthier eating behaviors and more sustainable food practices. Graduate students often struggle to maintain healthy dietary habits due to lifestyle transitions, academic stress, limited time, and constrained budgets, which can lead to poor meal planning, irregular eating patterns, and increased food waste.

Up to 25% of pregnant couples in the Netherlands do not make an informed decision about prenatal screening: their decisions are value-inconsistent or based on insufficient knowledge and deliberation. More than one-third (36%) of the population in the Netherlands has limited health literacy skills, with the majority being individuals with lower levels of education or a migration background. They experience serious problems in understanding health information and taking an active role in decision-making. Therefore, the Dutch Health Council recommends improving decision support for pregnant couples.

The integration of traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM) into modern medical education remains a global challenge. Kampo medicine, a Japanese traditional pharmacotherapy, is recognized in the , and is widely used; however, no structured methodology exists for efficiently designing curricula within limited time and resources. To address this gap, this study proposes a methodological framework—illustrated through Kampo medicine but generalizable to other forms of T&CM—for organizing and visualizing curricular content to guide educational needs assessment and curriculum design.