Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Health apps are often used without adequately taking aspects related to their quality under consideration. This may partially be due to inadequate awareness about necessary criteria and how to prioritize them when evaluating an app. The aim of this study was to introduce a method for prioritizing quality attributes in the mobile health context. To this end, physicians were asked about their assessment of nine app quality principles relevant in health contexts and their responses were used as a basis for designing a method for app prioritization.
Ultimately, the goal was to aid in making better use of limited resources eg, time by assisting with the decision as to the specific quality principles that deserve priority in everyday medical practice and those that can be given lower priority, even in cases where the overall principles are rated similarly.
A total of members of two German professional societies in the field of orthopedics were invited by email to participate in an anonymous online survey over a 1-month period. Participants were asked to rate a set of nine app quality principles using a Kano survey with functional and dysfunctional ie, positively and negatively worded questions. The evaluation was based on the work of Kano baseline , supplemented by a self-designed approach.
Among the invited members, completed relevant parts of the survey return rate of 4. Given similar ratings, common evaluation strategies for Kano surveys did not allow for conclusive prioritization of the principles, and the same was true when using the more elaborate approach of satisfaction and dissatisfaction indices following the work of Timko. Although the principles were previously almost exclusively rated as must-be with the exception of resource efficiency , which was not conducive to their prioritization, the new method applied from the must-be POV resulted in identical rankings for the test and validation groups: 1 legal conformity, 2 content validity, 3 risk adequacy, 4 practicality, 5 ethical soundness, 6 usability, 7 transparency, 8 technical adequacy, and 9 resource efficiency.
Established survey methodologies based on the work of Kano predominantly seek to categorize the attributes to be evaluated. The methodology presented here is an interesting option for prioritization, and enables focusing on the most important criteria, thus saving valuable time when reviewing apps for use in the medical field, even with otherwise largely similar categorization results.
