Digital Skills of the Medical Profession in the Prescription of Health Apps

Digital therapeutics allow evidence-based therapeutical intervention via the use of mobile health applications (“apps”) which, thanks to their freedom from the temporal and geographical restrictions of traditional treatments, have a great potential for improving the quality of healthcare. Although Germany paved the way for the regulatory integration of digital therapeutics in healthcare through the 2019 Digital Healthcare Act, many of these innovations have not yet been widely adopted.

In this respect, the acceptance and skillsets of medical professionals in particular are of great importance as they enable patients access to mobile healthcare applications via the prescription of digital therapeutics. However, digital therapeutics are different from the established processes and paradigms of drug prescription and require a high level of competence from both doctors and patients.

The objective of this research project is to examine doctors’ motivations for prescribing digital therapeutics and to derive suitable programs for doctor training. To achieve this, the team will carry out a dialog-based online experiment featuring artificially intelligent patient chatbots. The data from this will be evaluated to derive the implications for medical training on digital therapeutics in practice. The research project is designed to support the transfer of digital healthcare applications, especially digital therapeatics, into healthcare processes. What is more, the patient chatbot also offers potential for integration in education and training of medical specialists and focuses especially on the development of digital skills among trainee and practicing doctors.