In the current issue of JMIR Human Factors, we published a remarkably honest report of a failed randomized trial. After realizing that their intervention was poorly adopted, investigators wisely shifted the focus of their investigation and reporting to researching factors that contributed to the lack of uptake, rather than trying to retrospectively spin the trial into a "feasibility" study, concealing the fact that there were problems with adoption, as one can frequently see in the literature.
In fact, papers being explicit about a failed ehealth or mhealth intervention are rare. The JMIR eCollection on Failure Analysis has only a handfull of papers, which stands in no relationship to the actual failure rate of ehealth/mhealth interventions. We simply don't like to talk or write about failures. While the data on failed interventions and trials is limited, the Law of Attrition - lack of uptake, adoption, use and subsequent drop-out - is a well known phenomenon (in fact, the Law of Attrition is one of the most cited papers in this field).
To further build the science of "failures in digital health", as well as to encourage honest and complete publication of trials and projects even if they failed (thereby combatting publication bias), JMIR Human Factors is calling for papers for a special issue on failures in eHealth and mHealth. We assume that most failures have to do with lack of adoption due to usability issues or other human factors, but we would also be pleased to hear about technical failures.
We are looking for original papers, case studies, viewpoints, tutorials or reviews highlighting failures, lack of adoption, or human factors disasters in eHealth/mHealth.
All submissions will be peer-reviewed.
The deadline for submission is March 31st, 2018, but we encourage earlier submission, as papers will be published on a rolling basis. Please submit at http://humanfactors.jmir.org/author and select "Failure Analysis" as section.
The regular Article Processing Fees apply.
Papers which are rated as "high impact" by reviewers may be nominated for transfer to JMIR or JMIR mHealth, which are our flagship journals, ranked #1 and #2 in the medical informatics category by Impact Factor.
