Co-designing the future: End-user involvement in digital interventions

As healthcare systems are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by mounting demands for care and declining capacity, digitally enabled interventions are being adopted to relieve system pressure. To ensure digital healthcare interventions are appropriate and beneficial, co-design should be central to their development. Co-design approaches will be increasingly instrumental in shaping future digital medicine interventions to address the needs of populations and individuals, thereby reducing the risk of wasting resources on unwanted, inoperable, and ineffective interventions. There is a growing body of literature reporting how end-users have been involved in informing the development of digital healthcare interventions. However, there are consistent omissions and discrepancies in key details of the co-design process, as well as inconsistent terminology, contributing to a convoluted evidence base.