Impact of Digital Interventions on the Treatment Burden of Patients With Chronic Conditions: Systematic Review

Digital interventions can provide cost-effective, quality health care for patients with chronic conditions. Patients with chronic conditions often are burdened by a substantial load of adhering to a treatment regimen and suffer from impacts on their function and well-being. This treatment burden has consequences for treatment adherence and disease outcomes. Digital interventions have the potential to alleviate the burden, but they also may cause new challenges and an increased workload for the patient. Previous reviews have examined digital interventions or treatment burden separately, but there is a lack of systematic reviews on the intersection of digital interventions, treatment burden, and chronic conditions.

This systematic review aimed to evaluate the evidence of how digital interventions impact the treatment burden experienced by people with chronic conditions, and to assess the quality of this evidence.

We searched databases PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, ACM, PubMed Central, and CINAHL for articles published between January 1, 2013, and June 17, 2025. We included studies that had key topics related to chronic conditions, treatment burden, and digital interventions. A total of 2 reviewers independently screened the articles in 2 stages, extracted data on study design, participant characteristics, intervention type, and treatment burden outcomes from included articles, and assessed their quality using the Critical Appraisal tools from the Joanna Briggs Institute. A convergent integrated approach was used for data synthesis and integration, where quantitative data were converted into qualitative data, and the qualitative and quantitative evidence were analyzed and categorized together.

We included 46 relevant studies in total. We categorized the interventions into 4 types: Telehealth, informational resources, self-management tools, and facilitated tools. The results of this study indicate that digital interventions mostly support patients with chronic conditions with their treatment burden, with minor concerns of increasing treatment burden. The main benefits are support with self-management, informational support, and easier ways to contact health care professionals. The main concerns were accessibility issues, time-consuming tools, and causing fear and anxiety.

Our findings demonstrate how treatment burden is a relevant concept for future digital health care research and practice. Digital interventions can help patients with their treatment burden by supporting self-management, improving access to health care, improving patients' experience, and addressing relevant concerns. More research is needed about conditions with low or medium initial treatment burden.

RR2-10.2196/54833.