Improving the public health impact of eHealth and mHealth interventions

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 2018 vol. 42 no. 2 © 2017 The Authors This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. With more than three billion internet users worldwide,1 it is hard to overstate the potential benefits for public health of electronic and mobile technologies. These technologies offer the opportunity to deliver tailored interventions to the population with high fidelity at low cost, and can provide a means of addressing health inequities by enabling the delivery of sophisticated public health services to communities that find traditional forms of healthcare inaccessible.2 Harnessing electronic health (eHealth) and mobile health (mHealth) technologies to advance public health, however, has proven challenging. Despite widespread promotion,3 evidence supporting the effectiveness of technologybased interventions in addressing noncommunicable disease is varied. Evaluations of activity trackers, smartphone applications (apps) and web-based programs as the vehicle to deliver health interventions have reported such technologies are no more effective than paper-based approaches,4 or offer no additional benefit as an adjunct intervention.5 Although recent systematic reviews of eHealth and mHealth interventions targeting health behaviours provide some evidence for short-term benefit, effects are modest, and long-term efficacy is yet to be established.4,6