Participatory Development of an Integrated, eHealth-Supported, Educational Care Pathway (Diabetes Box) for People With Type 2 Diabetes: Development and Usability Study

• Published in: JMIR human factors 2024-05, Vol.11, p.e45055
• Main Authors: de Frel, Daan Leonhard, Schroijen, Mariëlle A, Aardoom, Jiska J, van Gils, Wesley, Huisman, Sasja D, Janssen, Veronica R, Versluis, Anke, Kleinsmann, Maaike S, Atsma, Douwe E, Pijl, Hanno
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behavior; Cellular telephones; Design; Diabetes; Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 - therapy; Education; Empowerment; Feedback; Female; Focus groups; Formative evaluation; Glucose monitoring; Health care expenditures; Humans; Lifestyles; Literature reviews; Male; Middle Aged; Original Paper; Patient Education as Topic - methods; Patients; Self Care; Self-Management - education; Self-Management - methods; Telemedicine; Usability
• ISSN: 2292-9495; 2292-9495
• DOI: 10.2196/45055

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) tremendously affects patient health and health care globally. Changing lifestyle behaviors can help curb the burden of T2D. However, health behavior change is a complex interplay of medical, behavioral, and psychological factors. Personalized lifestyle advice and promotion of self-management can help patients change their health behavior and improve glucose regulation. Digital tools are effective in areas of self-management and have great potential to support patient self-management due to low costs, 24/7 availability, and the option of dynamic automated feedback. To develop successful eHealth solutions, it is important to include stakeholders throughout the development and use a structured approach to guide the development team in planning, coordinating, and executing the development process. The aim of this study is to develop an integrated, eHealth-supported, educational care pathway for patients with T2D. The educational care pathway was developed using the first 3 phases of the Center for eHealth and Wellbeing Research roadmap: the contextual inquiry, the value specification, and the design phase. Following this roadmap, we used a scoping review about diabetes self-management education and eHealth, past experiences of eHealth practices in our hospital, focus groups with health care professionals (HCPs), and a patient panel to develop a prototype of an educational care pathway. This care pathway is called the Diabetes Box (Leiden University Medical Center) and consists of personalized education, digital educational material, self-measurements of glucose, blood pressure, activity, and sleep, and a smartphone app to bring it all together. The scoping review highlights the importance of self-management education and the potential of telemonitoring and mobile apps for blood glucose regulation in patients with T2D. Focus groups with HCPs revealed the importance of including all relevant lifestyle factors, using a tailored approach, and using digital consultations. The contextual inquiry led to a set of values that stakeholders found important to include in the educational care pathway. All values were specified in biweekly meetings with key stakeholders, and a prototype was designed. This prototype was evaluated in a patient panel that revealed an overall positive impression of the care pathway but stressed that the number of apps should be restricted to one, that there should be no delay in glucose value visualization, and that insuli