Dirk Volland

• Ph.D
• Researcher at University of St. Gallen

Importance Smartphone medical applications (apps) may improve blood pressure (BP) control in the primary care setting in patients with hypertension. However, real-world evidence from primary care is largely lacking. Objective To analyse, in primary care practices in Germany, the effect of a smartphone app on systolic BP compared to standard of car...

Objective The influence of baseline BP category and measurement duration on home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) are still poorly defined, particularly when used in conjunction with a digital application. Design and method This is a prospective analysis of real-world user data from a digital BP-coach (Manoa app ) in the period from April 2020 (re...

Introduction: Self-monitoring of blood pressure at home is a better predictor of prognosis and recommended in hypertension guidelines. However, the influence of baseline blood pressure category and measurement schedule on BP values during a period of home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) are still poorly defined, particularly when used in conjunct...

Objective: Home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) is recommended by guidelines for the management of hypertension. The Manoa smart phone app is a certified digital coach that informs, guides and supports users in guideline-compliant HBPM, which involves completion of at least 6 days of home BP measurements. The app has been freely available in all...

Non communicable diseases (NCDs) the greatest global burden. Health personnel is strongly limited to address NCDs satisfactory and thus, scalable, cost- efficient and evidence-based digital health interventions are required. This research investigates how to increase therapy adherence with a digital coach in the everyday life of patients.

Health professionals have limited resources and are not able to personally monitor and support patients in their everyday life. Against this background and due to the increasing number of self-service channels and digital health interventions, we investigate how text-based healthcare chatbots (THCB) can be designed to effectively support patients a...

The open source platform MobileCoach (mobile-coach.eu) has been used for various behavioral health interventions in the public health context. However, so far, MobileCoach is limited to text message-based interactions. That is, participants use error-prone and laborious text-input fields and have to bear the SMS costs. Moreover, MobileCoach does no...

Early detection and tailored treatment of job strain is important because it negatively affects the health condition of employees, the performance of organizations, and the overall costs of the health care system likewise. Although there exist several self-report instruments for measuring job strain, one major limitation is the low frequency of mea...

Pharmacist-patient communication is currently limited to infrequent encounters in pharmacies, which limits the delivery of and value created by pharmacy services. We seek to better understand how ICT can enable value creation by extending pharmacist-patient communication beyond these encounters. In an applied design science research study with 21 S...

As long as patients are on the inside of health care institutions, they are able to passively follow well-defined processes, and guidance is provided by hyper-differentiated health care organizations. Outside the institutional space, however, patients are in most instances completely on their own, are confronted with incomplete information, are exp...

Sensing-as-a-Service (S2aaS) is an emerging Internet of Things (IOT) business model pattern. To be technically feasible and to effectively allow for broad adoption, S2aaS implementations have to overcome manifold systemic hurdles, specifically regarding payment and sensor identification. In an effort to overcome these hurdles, we propose Bitcoin as...

Communication between healthcare professionals and patients is a major determinant of patients’ satisfaction, patients’ adherence, health outcomes, and ultimately of healthcare costs [1]. In most cases, however, personal communication between a healthcare professional and a patient is restricted to episodic face-to-face encounters. Once the face-to...

Pharmacist-Patient Health Information Systems (PPHIS) enable continuous communication between pharmacist and patient subsequent to their face-to-face encounter and aim to address the pervasive and costly phenomenon of patients’ non-adherence. To further improve the design of PPHIS and their underlying design principles, the present research-in-prog...

Communication between healthcare professionals and patients as part of the therapeutic process is often restricted to short, episodic face-to-face encounters within healthcare institutions. The absence of a continuous communication process that extends the face-to-face encounter to include the therapeutic process outside the institution limits the...

A significant drawback of communications between patients and health professionals is their restriction to face-to-face encounters within healthcare institutions. This limits the support health professionals can provide to ensure patient adherence, which is a significant contributor to therapeutic outcome and overall healthcare expenses. Pharmacist...

Benefits and opportunities of NFC technology have been discussed for many years. Continuous promises of handset manufacturers to embed this technology into their series of devices anytime soon have been fulfilled only partly so far. Contrasting with that, research and practice have outlined a number of applications that yield great attention among...