Journal of Medical Internet Research

Depression is heterogeneous and dynamic, and changes in observable behavior may accompany some of its clinical manifestations. Digital devices offer new opportunities to capture this behavior in naturalistic settings continuously. However, the specific digital features captured through device interactions and their relationships to depression-related outcomes have yet to be synthesized, and their potential relevance to functional constructs is unclear. The research domain criteria (RDoC) may provide a conceptual framework for exploring potential links between digital behaviors and functional constructs.

The rise of online mental health communities has reshaped the ways individuals seek and receive mental health support. Although online mental health communities (OMHCs) offer a valuable space for peer support, including through experience-sharing, they also present challenges, including moderation practices to cultivate supportive interactions and secure member safety. No comprehensive framework of moderation practices has been established. Developing such an understanding is important, as moderators play a central role in facilitating a sense of community and determining whether OMHCs function as safe and supportive spaces.

Smart care robots are increasingly viewed as a potential way to address care burden and support care quality in long-term care facilities. However, their integration into routine care practice remains limited, and the conditions required for their effective implementation are not yet well understood from the perspective of frontline nursing assistants.

Use of secure messaging within the patient portal has grown rapidly over recent years, yet clinical workflows, staffing models, and billing practices have generally not been comprehensively adapted to support this increasing volume of messages. Little is known about the characteristics of patients who are high-volume message senders, and we lack a nuanced understanding of patient messaging intensity beyond measures accounting for sheer volume, limiting health system efforts to anticipate message-related workflow demands and allocate resources effectively.

Globally, the carbon footprint of the health care sector is significant and growing, and digital health care technologies (DHTs) offer unique opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint of health and care systems. However, their environmental impact has not been adequately investigated.

Patient access to their electronic health records (EHRs) could improve care and reduce errors by enabling patient contribution to documentation. However, interactive functions that support such engagement remain underresearched.

Engagement with suicide-related content online is often assumed to be harmful, yet many individuals with lived experience describe such content as supportive or even life-preserving. Despite policy and clinical concerns, little is known about how people intentionally or unintentionally encounter this content, how they interpret it, and how these experiences shape perceived harm or benefit.

Patients with cancer frequently experience complex and multidimensional symptom burdens. Standardized patient-reported outcome measures provide structured approaches to symptom assessment but may not capture the full range of symptom-related and psychosocial concerns expressed in patients’ narratives. Patient-generated social media data offer a complementary source for examining how these concerns are expressed online.

Unemployment has economic consequences and is associated with emotional distress and impairment. Joblessness is often associated with depression, leading to a vicious cycle of reduced drive to seek work, deepening financial stress, and worsening depression. Few scalable interventions exist that integrate job-search strategies with cognitive behavioral techniques.

Clinical practice guidelines are central instruments of evidence-based care; yet, in many domains, particularly rare or complex diseases, multiple guidelines coexist and frequently offer conflicting advice. Existing strategies for resolving such divergences are often labor-intensive, opaque, and insufficiently reproducible.

Pediatric health care systems face increasing uncertainty driven by rapid technological change, workforce shifts and shortages, environmental threats, and evolving family and community needs. Pediatrics requires future-focused considerations that go beyond adult systems, including family-centered care, developmental trajectories, and long-term societal impacts on child well-being. While the future cannot be predicted, futures medicine methods offer structured approaches to anticipate change and support proactive, values-driven planning. This Viewpoint describes the application of pediatric futures methods within an academic, independent nonprofit pediatric health system and proposes a practical framework that connects future readiness to strategic decision-making and daily care delivery. Futures medicine methods are not new in pediatric health care but may not be visible from the front line of care delivery, which provides an opportunity for clinical, operational, administrative, and enterprise leaders to implement these methods in their workflows. This paper introduces the discover to deliver pediatric futures framework, a continuum that links long-range futures discovery to near-term strategic planning, operational design, implementation, and outcome demonstration, emphasizing future methods and activities for applicable use.