Recommending high-quality health apps: Identifying behavioral determinants with the highest potential for changing healthcare professional behavior

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) commonly are hesitant about prescribing apps and oftenexpress concerns about quality and reliability. For this purpose, a health and wellness appassessment framework and related quality label has been developed. Yet, additional barriersunrelated to quality may still prevent HCPs from prescribing high-quality health apps. The main aimof this study was to assess the behavioral determinants of HCP anticipated behavior ofrecommending high-quality (as indicated by the label) health apps to their patients. The study aimedto identify a wide range of behavioral determinants as identified in the Theoretical DomainsFramework (TDF). 290 Catalan HCPs filled in the survey, which included an adapted version of theTDF-checklist. For all barriers, room for improvement (based on descriptives), relevance (based oncorrelations), and the potential for change (based on combining descriptives and associations) wereassessed. A large majority of HCPs indicated they would recommend high-quality apps to theirpatients. Overall, HCPs were motivated, but more room for improvement was found for capabilityand opportunity-related domains. Anticipated recommendation behavior correlated strongest withmotivational factors like beliefs about consequences and beliefs about capabilities. The potential forchange was highest for nature of the behaviors, beliefs about capabilities and knowledge. Whenimplementing the label, efforts should focus on promoting habit formation for prescribing highqualityapps, boosting confidence of HCPs, and should provide further knowledge regarding healthapps.