Mobile Health Applications in Pediatric Patient Management: Clinicians' Perceptions, Expectations and Experiences

With the development of mobile devices, applications that have become widely used have also affected the provision of healthcare services. Efficient and fast applications that can be used by healthcare professionals as well as patients have begun to be developed. This has been shaped in different aspects by information and time management, calculations, communication, consultancy, electronic health record, patient management and monitoring, medical education and training, decision support system, reference and search for updated information.

There are many studies on physicians' use of mHealth applications. However, each clinic and each medical branch will have different expectations from mHealth applications. The investigators do not know the applications used by physicians participating in pediatric patient management in our country, their expectations from these applications, and their solutions. The investigators aim to learn the perceptions, expectations and experiences of physicians involved in pediatric patient management in Turkey about mHealth applications, and thus to guide future mHealth applications from the perspective of child health and diseases.

An online survey will be used as a data collection tool in our research. The online survey method was preferred in order to keep the research population and sample wide.

Our survey will consist of four sections and a total of 28 questions. Survey questions were derived by reviewing previous studies and national clinical experience. In the pilot study, 10 clinicians were asked to complete the survey. Feedback was received on the operation, duration, structure and readability of the questions of the survey. To ensure content validity and reliability, our survey was revised after the ethics committee evaluation and feedback given through the pilot application.

The first part was about physicians' basic demographic data and mobile device usage. Clinicians' perceptions regarding mHealth application usage were evaluated in the second section, their experiences were evaluated in the third section, and their expectations were evaluated in the fourth section. Those who did not agree to participate in the survey were asked a multiple-choice question asking why. Multiple choice, ranking, five-point Likert scale, and free text (age, etc.) questions were used in the survey. Additionally, in order to increase the reliability of the survey, some control questions were designed as negative-positive questions.

Our study will be reported in accordance with the CROSS (A Consensus-Based Checklist for Reporting of Survey Studies) guideline.

Inclusion criteria

• Being a medical doctor involved in the management of pediatric patients (0-18 years old)

Exclusion criteria

• Other specialists outside of pediatrics and family medicine.