A Method for Enabling Digital Health Technologies in Clinical and Translational Research at an Academic Medical Center.

Overview

Federal- and state-level governance as well as local institutional oversight are changing rapidly to address the accelerated growth in the usage of digital health technologies (DHT) -such as apps, wearables, and websites-to enable clinical and translational research. While studies have described frameworks for assessing and/or implementing individual DHTs, to our knowledge there are none describing how to implement and support multiple DHTs at an academic medical center (AMC). A multi-disciplinary team including information technology, institutional review board, legal, and privacy professionals identified 33 items to evaluate as part of onboarding studies using DHTs. In a one-year period at one AMC, we applied the novel instrument to review 98 requests for research (93) and non-research (5) use of DHTs. The 33-item instrument may be valuable to researchers and practitioners in other settings seeking to scale institutional support for DHTs.