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JMIR Formative Research

Process evaluations, early results, and feasibility/pilot studies of digital and non-digital interventions

Editor-in-Chief:

Amaryllis Mavragani, PhD, Scientific Editor at JMIR Publications, Canada


Impact Factor 2.1 More information about Impact Factor CiteScore 3.5 More information about CiteScore

JMIR Formative Research (JFR, ISSN 2561-326X) publishes peer-reviewed, openly accessible papers containing results from process evaluations, feasibility/pilot studies and other kinds of formative research and preliminary results. While the original focus was on the design of medical- and health-related research and technology innovations, JMIR Formative Research publishes studies from all areas of medical and health research.

Formative research is research that occurs before a program is designed and implemented, or while a program is being conducted. Formative research can help

  • define and understand populations in need of an intervention or public health program
  • create programs that are specific to the needs of those populations
  • ensure programs are acceptable and feasible to users before launching
  • improve the relationship between users and agencies/research groups
  • demonstrate the feasibility, use, satisfaction with, or problems with a program before large-scale summative evaluation (looking at health outcomes)

Many funding agencies will expect some sort of pilot/feasibility/process evaluation before funding a larger study such as a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT).

Formative research should be an integral part of developing or adapting programs and should be used while the program is ongoing to help refine and improve program activities. Thus, formative evaluation can and should also occur in the form of a process evaluation alongside a summative evaluation such as an RCT.

JMIR Formative Research fills an important gap in the academic journals landscape, as it publishes sound and peer-reviewed formative research that is critical for investigators to apply for further funding, but that is usually not published in outcomes-focused medical journals aiming for impact and generalizability.

Summative evaluations of programs and apps/software that have undergone a thorough formative evaluation before launch have a better chance to be published in high-impact flagship journals; thus, we encourage authors to submit - as a first step - their formative evaluations in JMIR Formative Research (and their evaluation protocols to JMIR Research Protocols). 

JMIR Formative Research is indexed in MEDLINEPubMed, PubMed CentralDOAJ, Scopus, Sherpa/Romeo, EBSCO/EBSCO Essentials, and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).

JMIR Formative Research received a Journal Impact Factor of 2.1 according to the latest release of the Journal Citation Reports from Clarivate, 2025.

With a CiteScore of 3.5 (2024) JMIR Formative Research is a Q2 journal in the field of Medicine (miscellaneous), according to Scopus data.

Recent Articles

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) people represent a culturally diverse people group within the United States. AI/AN people experience some of the most severe health disparities in the United States, including behavioral health. A quarter of AI/AN people in the United States live on tribal lands, experiencing significant barriers to mental health resources and broadband infrastructure for telehealth. We developed Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access (ARORA)—a mobile health (mHealth) smartphone app, promoting mindfulness practices and community building through AI/AN culture and values. Originally co-designed with both Hopi/Tewa and Navajo youth and adults, this study evaluated app resonance among Hopi/Tewa youth, supporting its iterative design. While we initially planned in-person user testing, this was moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Due to the colonization of tobacco plants by European settlers and the subsequent intensive marketing of commercial tobacco products to American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities in the United States, commercial cigarette smoking accounts for half of all deaths among AI/AN people. Limited awareness, access to treatment, and the absence of culturally relevant, effective smoking cessation interventions contribute to these high death rates.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

There is a growing interest in developing novel psychological interventions for eating disorders, with an emphasis on targeting maintaining factors. One hypothesized mechanism underlying illness maintenance is the experience of an “inner eating disorder voice,” which reinforces maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Preliminary studies suggest that the eating disorder voice is common among patients and is linked to greater illness severity.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Compared with other mental health problems, self-directed interventions for gambling problems lack in quantity, accessibility, and in some cases, evidence base. Moreover, engagement with these interventions remains modest. Mobile apps may be a viable format to deliver self-directed interventions that enhance user engagement.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Discharge planning (DP) is crucial for care continuity after a hospital stay but remains complex due to organizational constraints, interprofessional coordination, and administrative demands. Despite ongoing digitalization efforts, many health technologies overlook the sociotechnical nature of discharge processes, limiting acceptance and integration into clinical workflows.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

While artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted diagnostic software holds promise for improving diagnostic efficiency and reducing disparities in health care delivery, its effective implementation in lower-tier health care settings remains limited in China. Most existing studies have focused on algorithm performance, while real-world implementation strategies remain underexplored, particularly in resource-constrained clinical environments.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Despite the rapid expansion of internet infrastructure and digital health initiatives in China, there remains a lack of longitudinal, nationally representative analyses that track the concurrent development of general internet access and the specific adoption of online health services over the past decade. Understanding these parallel trends is crucial for evaluating the reach and equity of the ongoing digital health transformation.

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Pilot studies (ehealth)

Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are widely used in various health care settings. In Japan, pressure ulcers are becoming a major concern in an aging society due to their increasing prevalence. However, management is often handled by nonspecialists in wound care due to regional disparities in specialist availability.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems offer potential solutions to traditional constraints in medical consultation skills training, including high costs, scheduling difficulties, and varied standardization. There is limited evidence evaluating medical professionals’ perceptions of AI-generated patient interactions across multiple fidelity dimensions and assessing the educational value of conversational AI for consultation skills training.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telehealth as a key strategy within Brazil’s Unified Health System. In São Paulo State, digital health initiatives have been developed to implement telehealth-based care models across all 3 levels of health care.

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Development and Evaluation of Research Methods, Instruments and Tools

Approximately 3.8 billion people lack access to essential health services, and diagnostic interpretation remains a major bottleneck in remote and resource-constrained settings. Limited access to specialists and the complexity of biomedical signal interpretation (eg, electrocardiogram [ECG] and electroencephalogram) contribute to delays in recognizing cardiovascular and neurological conditions.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Extracting accurate medication information from Thai hospital records presents challenges due to the narrative style of medical notes, which often combine Thai and English terminology. Named entity recognition (NER) serves as the foundational step for advanced clinical information extraction (IE) tasks, including medical concept normalization and relation extraction. This study aimed to establish a robust NER framework to address these difficulties by leveraging ontology-based annotation and pretrained transformer models.

Preprints Open for Peer Review

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