Rogers MA, Lemmen K, Kramer R, Mann J, Chopra. (2017). Internet-delivered health interventions that work: systematic review of meta-analyses and evaluation of website availability. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 19(3): e90. doi: 10.2196/jmir.7111
In this review of meta-analyses of internet-based health interventions, researchers extracted the health topics addressed by the interventions, the availability of the interventions’ websites, and barriers to dissemination of these websites. Researchers identified 71 meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of at least one self-guided, individual, internet-based intervention that reported at least one health-related outcome. The meta-analyses reviewed 1733 studies and, of these studies, there were 268 RCTs of internet-based interventions. Fifty-seven (21.3%) of the RCTs demonstrated an improvement on at least one health-related outcome and evaluated a publicly available intervention (i.e. the intervention was available to people not participating in a research study). The interventions addressed substance use (106), mental health (66), diet and physical activity (46), disease management (31), disease prevention (17), and childhood health problems (2). In addition to websites not being publicly available, barriers to dissemination of the existing websites included the length and intensity of many of the programs and a minority of the programs (25) being free to use.