Support Strategies and Interventions for eHealth Inclusion: Scoping Review

Policymakers increasingly promote eHealth as a way to improve health care efficiency. However, digitalization risks excluding individuals and groups who cannot fully engage with eHealth, for example, due to limited digital literacy or restricted access to resources. Targeted support, such as skills training, personalized guidance, or system-level initiatives, may help, but evidence on how such support is organized and on their outcomes for eHealth inclusion remains limited.

This scoping review aimed to map proposed strategies to promote eHealth inclusion, identify concrete support interventions, and report evidence on their outcomes.

This scoping review followed the PRISMA-ScR guidelines (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews). Our search included PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Embase for peer-reviewed studies published from 2014 onward, and the search was completed on January 29, 2024. We included empirical studies reporting on support to enhance eHealth inclusion. In total, 40 studies met the criteria: 19 examined support strategies and 21 evaluated targeted interventions. Strategies and interventions were categorized by actors at the microlevel (interpersonal, such as family members, friends, or peers), mesolevel (organizations, such as health care organizations or community organizations), and macrolevel (policy or system).

Support strategies and interventions addressed a range of eHealth types, including video consultations, mobile health applications, and patient portals. Strategy studies often emphasized interpersonal support from family, friends, or peers, whereas interventions more often involved health care providers. Intervention outcomes, as identified during analysis, were grouped into adoption, use, skills, and attitudes. Adoption-focused interventions led by health care organizations showed limited or not statistically demonstrated effectiveness. Interventions targeting use partly demonstrated positive effects, such as increased completion of video visits, whereas outcomes related to attitudes were mixed. Nearly all multiactor interventions-combining efforts across micro-, meso-, and macrolevels-effectively improved eHealth skills, including digital and eHealth literacy. Examples include programs linking health care providers with community organizations and initiatives pairing students with older adults, both of which improved these skills. Regional differences were also observed: health care providers played a dominant role in studies from the United States, community organizations were more prominent in African contexts, and multiactor approaches were common in European studies.

Overall, interventions yielded mixed results, but multiactor collaborations frequently improved eHealth skills. These findings underscore the value of combining interpersonal, organizational, and policy-level efforts when designing support structures. For health care organizations, initiatives led solely by health care actors may suffice for promoting the use of specific applications (such as video consultations), but they seem insufficient for fostering broader eHealth literacy. Future research should address the sustainability and scalability of multiactor interventions and how health system contexts and cultural factors shape their outcomes.