Building a regional database of experiential knowledge on health promotion and digital tools, France

Issue

Digital technology has become an increasingly important aspect of our lives. This growth also creates a lot of concerns among professionals and families. In France, health promotion (HP) actors are more and more being called on to discuss and analyse the issue of health and digital technology, but knowledge on this subject is not always shared. Furthermore, there is no inventory about experiential knowledge which could explain how the interventions in this particular field are designed. The Good Ideas and Promising Practices (BIPP) approach has been elaborated by the Regional Health Promotion and Education Association in Auvergne Rhône Alpes (FRANCE) to fill this gap.

Description

The BIPP approach aims to identify interventions perceived as promising to inspire HP actors who support the digital practice of young people, as well as their parents and the educational community. The BIPP inventory process is based on 7 steps and relies on local partnership to identify innovative interventions. Collected actions are classified by major areas of intervention and offer HP actors a selection of what has been put in place in terms of digital tools. The most promising practices are selected to build a database of experiential knowledge.

Results

90 interventions were identified. 60 interventions were selected according to the validated criteria: sustainable, iterative interventions, empowering people and affecting vulnerable groups. A process of experience capitalisation, based on the adjusted method developed by a national multidisciplinary committee, has been carried out for the most notably promising interventions, and videos have been made to enhance knowledge transfer in HP and digital tools.

Lessons

The BIPP approach has produced a lot of contents that HP actors can draw inspiration from. The process shared within a partner network can easily be replicated in other settings and countries.

Key messages

In addition to scientific knowledge, experiential knowledge on digital tools interventions is useful and must be shared in HP community to enhance the quality of interventions. Promising practices in health promotion can be formalised by the BIPP replicable inventory process to build up and share knowledge to support other interventions, decisions and advocacy.

[The evaluation of pharmacological drugs, medical devices, and non-pharmacological or public health interventions: Experimental design limitations. Moving towards new methods?]

In the field of health, evidence-based medicine and associated methods like randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have become widely used. RCT has become the gold standard for evaluating causal links between interventions and health results. Originating in pharmacology, this method has been progressively expanded to medical devices, non-pharmacological individual interventions, as well as collective public health interventions. Its use in these domains has led to the formulation of several limits, and it has been called into question as an undisputed gold standard. Some of those limits (e.g. confounding biases and external validity) are common to these four different domains, while others are more specific. This paper describes the different limits, as well as several research avenues. Some are methodological reflections aiming at adapting RCT to the complexity of the tested interventions, and at overcoming some of its limits. Others are alternative methods. The objective is not to remove RCT from the range of evaluation methodologies, but to resituate it within this range. The aim is to encourage choosing between different methods according to the features and the level of the intervention to evaluate, thereby calling for methodological pluralism.