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Letters (85)

Published on in Vol 8, No 2 (2006):

Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet: How Systematic was the Review? - Author's Reply

Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet: How Systematic was the Review? - Author's Reply

Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet: How Systematic was the Review? - Author's Reply

Authors of this article:

Frances Griffiths
Article Authors Cited by (3) Tweetations Metrics

    Letter

    Corresponding Author:

    Frances Griffiths

    Senior Clinical Lecturer

    Centre for Primary Health Care Studies

    Warwick Medical School

    University of Warwick

    Coventry, CV4 7AL

    United Kingdom

    Phone: +44 (0) 2476 572950

    Fax:+44 (0) 2476 528375

    Email: F.E.Griffiths@warwick.ac.uk


    Related ArticlesComment on: Griffiths F, Lindenmeyer A, Powell J, Lowe P, Thorogood M. Why Are Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet? A Systematic Review of the Published Literature. J Med Internet Res. 2006 Jun 23;7(2) p. e10 http://www.jmir.org/2006/2/e10/
    Comment on: Mayo-Wilson E. Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet: How Systematic was the Review? J Med Internet Res. 2006;8(2) p. e11 http://www.jmir.org/2006/2/e11/
    J Med Internet Res 2006;8(2):e12

    doi:10.2196/jmir.8.2.e12



    We thank Evan Mayo-Wilson for raising the issue on how systematic and exhaustive our search for our recent qualitative analysis [1] was. This was not a systematic review as in a common usage of the term for example by the Cochrane Collaboration. We used systematic methods to undertake a qualitative review of the literature on health care interventions delivered over the Internet. To identify common themes it was important to identify a broad range of published studies but we did not feel that it was necessary to be exhaustive. In our paper we describe in some detail how we identified the literature including the use of three existing systematic reviews, a hand search of JMIR and our own previously published literature review. Through the triangulation of these search approaches we aimed to identify the main body of relevant literature. We realise we may not have identified every published paper of relevance.

    Thank you for drawing our attention to the paper by Klein and Richards [2]. This paper would be excluded from our review. As mentioned in our paper the focus of our review was interventions where the networking provided by the Internet is a component of the intervention. One of our exclusion criteria was “no networked features, such as computer-based decision support systems delivered from a CD or interventions where there was no use of the Internet beyond delivery (ie, they could have been delivered by a CD)”. From the description of the intervention in the Klein and Richards paper it appears to have no networked features.

    1. Griffiths F, Lindenmeyer A, Powell J, Lowe P, Thorogood M. Why Are Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet? A Systematic Review of the Published Literature. J Med Internet Res 2006 Jun 23;8(2):e10 [FREE Full text] [CrossRef]
    2. Klein B, Richards JC. A Brief Internet-based Treatment for Panic Disorder. Behav Cog Psychother 2001 Mar 06;29(1):113-117. [CrossRef]

    Edited by G Eysenbach; This is a non–peer-reviewed article. submitted 27.06.06; accepted 30.06.06; published 30.06.06

    Copyright

    © Frances Griffiths. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 30.6.2005. Except where otherwise noted, articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, including full bibliographic details and the URL (see "please cite as" above), and this statement is included.