Continued Implementation and Use of a Digital Informal Care Support Platform Before and After COVID-19: Multimethod Study.

Continued Implementation and Use of a Digital Informal Care Support Platform Before and After COVID-19: Multimethod Study.

Publication date: Dec 31, 2024

With the growing need of support for informal caregivers (ICs) and care recipients (CRs) during COVID-19, the uptake of digital care collaboration platforms such as Caren increased. Caren is a platform designed to (1) improve communication and coordination between ICs and health care professionals, (2) provide a better overview of the care process, and (3) enhance safe information sharing within the care network. Insights on the impact of COVID-19 on the implementation and use of informal care platforms such as Caren are still lacking. This study aimed to (1) identify technology developers’ lessons learned from the continued implementation of Caren during COVID-19 and (2) examine pre-post COVID-19 changes in usage behavior and support functionality use of Caren. A focus group with developers of the Caren platform (N=3) was conducted to extract implementation lessons learned. Focus group data were first analyzed deductively, using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research domains (ie, individual characteristics, intervention characteristics, inner setting, and outer setting). Later, inductive analysis of overarching themes was performed. Furthermore, survey data were collected in 2019 (N=11,635) and 2022 (N=5573) among Caren platform users for comparing usage behavior and support functionality use. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Several lessons from the continued implementation of Caren during COVID-19 were identified. Those included, for example, alternative ways to engage with end users, incorporating automated user support and large-scale communication features, considering the fluctuation of user groups, and addressing data transparency concerns in health care. Quantitative results showed that the number of ICs and CRs who used Caren several times per day increased significantly (P

Concepts Keywords
Covid Adult
Developers Aged
Increased Caregivers
Transparency Caren
consolidated framework
COVID
COVID-19
digital care platform
eHealth
Female
Focus Groups
Humans
implementation
informal care
Male
Middle Aged
new digital normal

Semantics

Type Source Name
disease MESH COVID-19
drug DRUGBANK Tropicamide
disease IDO process
disease IDO intervention

Original Article

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