A scoping review of qualitative research in JAMIA: past contributions and opportunities for future work.

OBJECTIVE: Qualitative methods are particularly well-suited to studying the complexities and contingencies that emerge in the development, preparation, and implementation of technological interventions in real-world clinical practice, and much remains to be done to use these methods to their full advantage. We aimed to analyze how qualitative methods have been used in health informatics research, focusing on objectives, populations studied, data collection, analysis methods, and fields of analytical origin. METHODS: We conducted a scoping review of original, qualitative empirical research in JAMIA from its inception in 1994 to 2019. We queried PubMed to identify relevant articles, ultimately including and extracting data from 158 articles. RESULTS: The proportion of qualitative studies increased over time, constituting 4.2% of articles published in JAMIA overall. Studies overwhelmingly used interviews, observations, grounded theory, and thematic analysis. These articles used qualitative methods to analyze health informatics systems before, after, and separate from deployment. Providers have typically been the main focus of studies, but there has been an upward trend of articles focusing on healthcare consumers. DISCUSSION: While there has been a rich tradition of qualitative inquiry in JAMIA, its scope has been limited when compared with the range of qualitative methods used in other technology-oriented fields, such as human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and science and technology studies. CONCLUSION: We recommend increased public funding for and adoption of a broader variety of qualitative methods by scholars, practitioners, and policy makers and an expansion of the variety of participants studied. This should lead to systems that are more responsive to practical needs, improving usability, safety, and outcomes.

Analyzing Description, User Understanding and Expectations of AI in Mobile Health Applications.

Previous research has studied medical professionals' perception of artificial intelligence (AI). However, there has been a limited understanding of how healthcare consumers perceive and use AI-powered technologies such as mobile health apps. We collected 40 popular mobile health apps that claim to have adopted AI, to study how AI is explained in these apps' descriptions, and how users react to it through app reviews. We found that four AI features (Recommendation, Conversational Agent, Recognition, and Prediction) are frequently used across seven health domains, including Fitness, Mental Health, Meditation and Sleep, Nutrition and Diet, etc. Our results show that (1) users have unique expectations toward each AI features, such as including feedback for recommendations, humanlike experience for conversational agents, and accuracy for recognition and prediction; (2) when AI is not adequately described, users make their own attempts to understand AI and to find out how (well) it works.