Unfortunately, many digital health interventions fail to realize their potential. Although there is no recipe for success, there are ways in which developers, implementers, and adopters can help to maximize successful implementation, adoption, and scaling. During development and early use, these include for example, establishing a need for an innovation, involving end-users, and mapping existing processes. When considering scaling and sustainability, there is a need to assess transferability across context and optimization of functionality over time.

Professor Kathrin Cresswell is a social scientist with extensive experience in conducting formative evaluations of digitally enabled change and improvement programmes in health and care. She has consulted for the World Health Organization, Harvard Medical School, NHS England and Improvement. She is a member of the International Academy of Quality and Safety in Health Care, the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland, has received the Yvonne Carter Award for Outstanding New Researcher, and has been an invited speaker at the European Parliament and Harvard Medical School. She is also a Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and co-chair of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and European Federation of Medical Informatics Evaluation Working Groups on evaluation. She has over 140 peer-reviewed publications in international academic journals and £56 million in research grant funding. She is currently Professor of Digital Innovations in Health and Care at the Usher Institute at The University of Edinburgh, and Course Lead on a Scottish national digital health leadership programme. She was previously Module Lead on an English national digital health leadership programme and has taught over 450 national and international health information technology leaders about Technology Strategy and Health Information Systems Implementation.
She has researched the use of a variety of health information technologies in context over almost years. These have included both patient- and professional-facing technologies comprising electronic health records, robotics, health and fitness apps, artificial intelligence and decision support systems. She is an expert in conducting evaluations of digital applications, having applied formative methods in a variety of health and care settings (hospitals, primary care, and home). Bringing together stakeholders with varying perspectives is key to her ongoing work, where she examines how political, commercial, organisational, patient and health and care workers’ interests need to be aligned to transform health and care through safe and scalable technologies.