JMIR Formative Research

The purpose of preoperative informed consent is to provide patients with comprehensive information about their treatment, including risks and alternatives, to enable informed decision-making. However, studies have shown that patients are often unable to understand or remember important information. Mobile health (mHealth) and augmented reality (AR) apps have been identified as promising solutions to improve patient education and knowledge retention.

Digital health technologies can potentially increase the efficiency and quality of pediatric palliative care (PPC), yet their use in home-based PPC remains limited. Limited digital health care literacy and inadequate training can reduce confidence and foster negative attitudes, whereas positive experiences and basic digital health care literacy may encourage adoption.

US veterans with mental health disorders have high rates of smoking and low rates of smoking cessation.

The integration of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems into the domain of medical question-answering (QA) presents a significant opportunity to enhance the effectiveness and accuracy of clinical support systems.

Across populations, risky drinking has been demonstrated to increase HIV risk behaviors. This is of special concern for sexually minoritized cisgender men and gender-diverse young adults (aged 18‐34 years), who report greater incidence of hazardous drinking (as defined by the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test - Consumption criteria) and HIV compared to their heterosexual and/or cisgender peers.

Accurate patient record linkage is essential for clinical care, health information exchange, research, and public health surveillance. However, linkage accuracy may vary across demographic groups due to differences in data completeness, quality, and the structural factors underlying how demographic information is captured.

First responders, such as firefighters, experience significant mental health issues due to the high-stress nature of their work. Existing mental health interventions, such as meditation and debriefing, despite their benefits, do not target cognitive processing of traumatic events such as memory and emotion.

Black women experience dual disparities with disproportionately high rates of HIV infection and low uptake of preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP). To address this issue, a culturally relevant eHealth video intervention was developed to increase awareness and uptake of PrEP.

Translation is important in research to ensure cultural relevance, accuracy, and generalizability, particularly in cross-cultural studies. The forward-backward translation method of the World Health Organization (WHO) is commonly used to improve linguistic and conceptual accuracy but is often time-consuming and resource intensive. The development of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to make the translation process more efficient, potentially reducing time and costs. However, concerns remain regarding the ability of AI to capture cultural nuances and complex linguistic structures, which may affect translation quality. Therefore, evidence on how AI can be effectively integrated into established translation frameworks remains limited.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a chronic hematologic malignancy characterized by complex therapeutic strategies, repeated relapses, and substantial information and psychosocial needs. Advances in oral therapies and outpatient management have shifted greater responsibility to patients and caregivers, emphasizing the need for accessible, high-quality educational resources. Therapeutic patient education (TPE) aims to empower patients to understand and manage their condition more effectively. Digital education tools such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) represent an innovative approach to deliver structured, interactive, and scalable learning experiences to large patient populations. However, few MOOCs have been specifically designed for patients with oncological or hematological disorders, and even fewer have been rigorously evaluated for their educational impact.

Japan has universal coverage and designated pediatric oncology centers, yet the childhood cancer information ecosystem remains a “black box.” The incidence is measurable, but treatment exposure and long-term follow-up are not reliably linked across hospitals, registries, and survivorship services. The World Health Organization (WHO) CureAll framework highlights information governance as a lever for equity. This study aims to propose a formative design for national digital governance connecting registries, clinical systems, and survivorship in Japan. We synthesized international guidance and Japanese statutes, plans, and registry reports. Drawing on operational experience, we specified a minimal pediatric dataset, an HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)–based interoperability architecture, and governance to align standards, consent, and data use. No new empirical data were collected. We outline a 4-layer architecture. Source systems (electronic health records, laboratory and radiology systems, pathology, and cooperative group databases) feed an HL7 FHIR gateway. A national Pediatric Data Steward governs standards and interoperability (FHIR profiles and application programming interfaces), terminology and coding (International Classification of Diseases for Oncology and International Classification of Childhood Cancer, with mappings to Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine–Clinical Terms and Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes), privacy and consent, data-use agreements, data quality, and audit. Outputs flow to the National and Hospital-based Cancer Registries and a patient-facing Digital Survivorship Passport, with bidirectional clinic updates and linkage to the resident registry and vital statistics. Security, audit, and public reporting span all layers. We define pediatric indicators and a staged road map. Transforming Japan’s pediatric oncology information into a learning system is chiefly a governance task. A Pediatric Data Steward, a harmonized pediatric data dictionary via FHIR, and a portable survivorship passport with layered consent can improve timeliness, completeness, follow-up, and transparency.

Postoperative intensive care unit (ICU) admission affects 15% to 20% of surgical patients and represents a major source of morbidity and health care costs. Current anesthetic dosing relies on empirical guidelines rather than individualized risk assessment. We developed a counterfactual dose-response model to identify optimal fentanyl-propofol combinations.