Reporting quality of extended reality interventions in healthcare: towards a TIDieR XReporting checklist

Abstract Extended reality (XR), including virtual, mixed and augmented reality, is increasingly being utilised within the healthcare industry to assist in providing education, clinical interventions, preparing for and undertaking clinical procedures and surgery, as well as undertaking research that would be otherwise unfeasible through traditional research methods. Recent scoping reviews have highlighted, however, that the reporting of XR interventions has been poor, providing an obstacle for the integration of XR into healthcare. Since being first published in 2014, the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) Checklist has been widely utilised to facilitate the accurate reporting and comprehensive development of clinical intervention protocols. This research aims to investigate the reporting quality of XR interventions and to identify considerations for a TIDieR-XReporting elaboration statement. A cross-sectional study of 150 XR interventions published between 2023 and April 2025 was undertaken to identify items relevant for the consideration in the development of an XR TIDieR elaboration statement. The 37 identified items were only reported 42% of the time within the 150 identified articles. Items relating to safety and implementation such as cybersecurity (1%), screening of relative and absolute contraindications (9%), infection control (13%), and providers’ XR related experience (5%) were poorly reported, indicating that current reporting fails to adequately provide information that would facilitate replication and integration of XR into healthcare. In future, an international Delphi study should be undertaken to further develop and formalise these considerations.