Opportunities and Challenges for Designing in Connected Health: Insights From an Expert Workshop

Health care increasingly depends on information and communication technology. This offers both opportunities and challenges when designing connected health systems. While individual studies examined particular cases, there is a limited synthesis of insights across projects. The objective of this paper is to explore these opportunities and challenges by examining 6 diverse connected health projects and synthesizing lessons from an expert workshop. To achieve this, we conducted a full-day workshop that brought together 6 connected health projects. The workshop used an iterative and participatory process which included paper submissions and presentations and facilitated discussions, and a gallery walk to enable cross-case comparison and collaborative reflection. Thematic analysis of workshop outputs was then used to synthesize key opportunities and challenges in designing connected health systems. The 6 projects represented a variety of design methods and approaches to connected health, and their discussion surfaced both opportunities and challenges in this domain. Key opportunities include improving data integration and usability, enhancing collaboration across stakeholders, using a user-centered and iterative design process, addressing complexity in sociotechnical systems, sustainability, and adopting digital infrastructures for seamless communication. Participants also identified important challenges, namely exchange of information, interoperability, and communication; ethical considerations, rules, and regulations; understanding design, evaluation, and standards; actionable data, reliability, quality, and trust in data; and stakeholder involvement. The contribution of this paper lies in the synthesis of insights across multiple projects and perspectives to provide practical guidance for researchers, designers, and policymakers. By highlighting opportunities and challenges in designing connected health systems, the findings emphasize the importance of patient-centered, sustainable, and collaborative design approaches while also pointing to the need to address persistent barriers. Advancing connected health will require adopting iterative and inclusive design processes that prioritize patient-centeredness, sustainability, and collaboration across health care systems.