Persuasive Design Techniques and App Design Recommendations to Improve Health Workforce Capability in Rural Health Professionals: What Do Users Want and How Does an App Help?

BACKGROUND: Health professionals' perceptions of persuasive design techniques for use in technological solutions to improve health workforce capability have not been previously explored. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore rural health professionals' perceptions of health workforce capability and persuasive design techniques; and translate these into recommendations for designing a health workforce capability app to increase their impact and usefulness. METHODS: Qualitative interviews with 13 rural health professionals were conducted. Subsequently, 32 persuasive techniques were used as a framework to deductively analyze the data. Persuasive design technique domains were Primary Task Support, Dialog Support, System Credibility Support, Social Support, and Cialdini's Principles of Persuasion. RESULTS: Persuasive design techniques can be applied across the factors that influence health workforce capability including health and personal qualities; competencies and skills; values, attitudes, and motivation; and factors that operate outside of work and at the team, organizational, and labor market levels. The majority of the 32 persuasive design techniques were reflected in the data from the interviews and led to recommendations as to how these could be translated into practice, with the exception of scarcity. Many suggestions and persuasive design techniques link back to the need for tailored and localized solutions such as the need for country-specific-based evidence, the wish for localized communities of practice, learning from other rural health professionals, and referral pathways to other clinicians. Participants identified how persuasive design techniques can optimize the user experience to help meet rural health professionals needs for more efficient systems to improve patient access to care, quality care, and to enable working in interprofessional team-based care. Social inclusion plays a vital role for health professionals, indicating the importance of the Social Support domain of persuasive techniques. Overall, health professionals were open to self-monitoring of their work performance and some professionals used wearables to monitor their health. CONCLUSIONS: Rural health professionals' perceptions of health workforce capability informed which persuasive design techniques can be used to optimize the user experience of an app. These were translated into recommendations for designing a health workforce capability app to increase likelihood of adoption. This study has also contributed to the further validation of the Persuasive Systems Design model through empirically aligning elements of the model to increase persuasive system content and functionality with real-world applied data, in this case the health workforce capability of rural health professionals. Our findings confirm that these techniques can be used to develop a future prototype of an app that may assist health professionals in improving or maintaining their health workforce capability which in turn may increase recruitment and retention in rural areas. Health professionals need to be central during the design phase. Interventions are needed to provide a supportive environment to rural and remote health professionals to increase their rural health workforce capability.

Development of a framework to promote rural health workforce capability through digital solutions: A qualitative study of user perspectives.

A high-quality, sustained, health workforce contributes to a healthy population. However, a global reality is that rural health services, and the workforces that provide those services, are under unprecedented pressure. It is posited that improving a rural health practitioners' capability could help to retain them working rurally for longer. Capability refers to skills and experience and the extent to which individuals can adapt to change, generate new knowledge and continue to improve their performance. With rapidly increasing access to, and use of, digital technology worldwide, there are new opportunities to build capability and leverage personal and professional support for those who are working rurally. In 2021, semi-structured interviews were conducted in rural Australia with thirteen General Practitioners and allied health professionals. Thematic analysis was adopted to analyse the data and map it to the Health Information Technology Acceptance Model. Whilst it could be assumed that low technology literacy would act as a barrier to the use of digital tools, the study demonstrated that this was not a significant impediment to participants' willingness to adopt digital tools when social and professional networks weren't available face to face to address their capability challenges. The findings provide insight into the concept of health workforce capability and important considerations when designing capability support. This includes key features of health apps or digital tools to support the capability of the rural health workforce. Understanding the factors that make up a health professionals' capability and the motivations or cues to act to build or maintain their capability may have a positive effect on their retention in a rural location.