Reporting Digital Health Implementations Based on the iCHECK-DH Guidelines and Checklist: Development of an Interactive Toolkit.

BACKGROUND

Despite their potential, many digital health implementations fail to scale beyond pilot stages due to reporting challenges, stakeholder disengagement, and policy barriers. To improve documentation and knowledge sharing, the iCHECK-DH (Guidelines and Checklist for the Reporting on Digital Health Implementations) guidelines have been developed by global experts and implemented by the Journal of Medical Internet Research as the required reporting standard for implementation reports.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to introduce an interactive iCHECK-DH toolkit designed to streamline reporting, facilitate knowledge sharing, and support scalability, demonstrating its practical application through a use case.

METHODS

The iCHECK-DH toolkit was developed through an iterative process informed by best practices for creating user-friendly toolkits. A targeted literature review and analysis of World Health Organization documents were conducted to identify best practices in toolkit design. A multidisciplinary team designed the toolkit using the Fillout platform (Restly, Inc) for its intuitive interface. A total of 9 international experts in digital health and implementation science were recruited through purposive sampling. They provided qualitative feedback through semistructured interviews and open-ended comments on the draft toolkit. Discussions focused on content relevance, usability, and alignment with the iCHECK-DH framework. Feedback was thematically analyzed and key suggestions were incorporated iteratively into subsequent versions of the toolkit. It underwent pilot testing, with a real-world Family Planning Stock Management System in Sri Lanka serving as the use case. The findings further refined the toolkit's practicality and informed final improvements.

RESULTS

The interactive toolkit successfully translated the iCHECK-DH guidelines into a structured digital health implementations reporting tool, refining navigation, terminology, and usability based on qualitative feedback from the expert panel. It features 4 main sections, including a step-by-step checklist aligned with the 20 items of the iCHECK-DH framework, contextual explanations and examples for each item, a self-assessment function to track progress, and automatic compilation of a downloadable PDF report. Pilot testing showed that the toolkit enabled comprehensive documentation of all 9 domains and 20 checklist items from the iCHECK-DH framework. It confirmed its practicality and effectiveness, leading to targeted improvements. Time to complete the toolkit was 40 minutes (final version) after usability refinements.

CONCLUSIONS

The iCHECK-DH toolkit complements the iCHECK-DH guidelines, enhances their functionality, and demonstrates their usability through a practical use case. It provides a structured approach to digital health reporting, supporting scalability and knowledge sharing in real-world implementations.