Journal of Medical Internet Research
The leading peer-reviewed journal for digital medicine and health and health care in the internet age.
Editor-in-Chief:
Gunther Eysenbach, MD, MPH, FACMI, Founding Editor and Publisher; Adjunct Professor, School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Canada Rachele Hendricks-Sturrup, DHSc, MSc, MA, FACTS, Lead Editor; Research Director of Real-World Evidence, Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy, Washington, DC
Impact Factor 8.2 More information about Impact Factor CiteScore 10.4 More information about CiteScore
Recent Articles

In a diagnostic study of 104 western blot and subcutaneous xenograft tumor images, a high-fidelity generative model produced forgeries that could alter the conclusions of a study; 24 PhD-level expert reviewers could not reliably distinguish the forgeries from authentic figures (mean accuracy 50.5%, SD 6.9%), while the best-performing commercial AI detector achieved only moderate discrimination (area under the curve 0.790, 95% CI 0.695-0.885), revealing critical vulnerabilities in current research-integrity safeguards.

Social media platforms, particularly YouTube (Google LLC), are important sources of health information, but also significant vectors for misinformation and pseudoscience. While many studies analyze the content and sentiment of this information, the dynamic, sequential nature of user interactions, which can shape belief formation and community dynamics, remains poorly understood.

Training mental health clinicians to conduct standardized clinical assessments is challenging due to a lack of scalable, realistic practice opportunities. Traditional methods often fail to prepare trainees for the variability and complexity of real-world patient interactions, potentially impacting data quality in clinical trials. This paper introduces a novel approach to address this training gap using large language model (LLM)–based interview simulations.

Periodontitis is one of the most prevalent yet preventable oral diseases, as indicated by multiple clinical and radiographic factors. As these factors are recorded in electronic health records (EHRs), their reuse offers opportunities for personalized risk assessment and targeted prevention. Predictive AI and traditional machine learning models support fragmented detection tasks but lack the integration of textual and imaging predictors. Emerging multimodal large language models (M-LLMs) show promise in combining these data sources for clinical assessment. Evaluating the capabilities of M-LLMs and comparing them against the current clinical standard are therefore essential to determine their potential as digital assistants.

Medical AI is often evaluated using aggregate measures of discrimination, calibration, and accuracy. However, these measures can obscure clinically important variation across patient groups, institutions, devices, and workflows. This viewpoint defines refined exclusion as a governance condition in which an AI system appears successful in aggregate, while uncertainty, error, or reduced clinical reliability is concentrated in populations that are insufficiently represented, measured, validated, or monitored. The concept does not replace algorithmic fairness, hidden stratification, dataset shift, or subgroup performance analysis. It connects these mechanisms to a distinct consequence: an unequal distribution of safety that remains inadequately detected or corrected. Drawing on purposively selected, illustrative evidence from population health management, chest radiography, dermatology, computational pathology, medical foundation models, and clinical measurement, we distinguish model-level disparity, patient safety signals, and documented patient harm. We then frame data justice as a complementary governance approach with distributional, procedural, and substantive dimensions. The proposed lifecycle decision gates address intended use, subgroup learnability, data provenance, validation, procurement, local deployment, monitoring, updates, and patient feedback. Each gate links minimum evidence to decision authority and 1 of 4 actions: proceed, enrich or validate, restrict use, or pause or retire. Governance intensity should be proportionate to clinical risk and evidentiary uncertainty. By linking subgroup evidence gaps to institutional decisions and corrective action, the framework shifts attention from whether a model performs well on average to whether its safety is demonstrable for the populations and settings in which it will be used.


Real-time audiovisual connections between health care providers (HCPs) in neonatal care, known as TeleNeonatology (TeleNeo), can improve neonatal care. For patients and families, TeleNeo was found to improve patient outcomes and facilitate family-integrated and patient-centered care by ensuring timely access to expert involvement regardless of location, which can strengthen trust and reassurance. For clinicians and health care organizations, TeleNeo enables expert decision-making, fosters continuous professional development, promotes knowledge exchange between hospitals, and increases staff confidence in managing complex medical cases. However, organizational, technical, and infrastructural requirements can hinder successful implementation and sustained adoption of technological interventions, such as TeleNeo. Implementation can be time-consuming and may fail due to the challenges encountered during the implementation process, particularly when incorporating the intervention into existing workflows across multiple hospitals. Nevertheless, there are case studies that demonstrate successful implementation of TeleNeo into routine care. Informed by international experience and theoretical underpinnings of implementation science, this tutorial presents a toolkit to provide step-by-step guidance for health care institutions considering TeleNeo implementation. The objective of the toolkit is to help health care organizations effectively and efficiently implement TeleNeo in their neonatal care pathways. The toolkit provides a structured guide that encompasses the entire implementation process, from initial ideas to stakeholder engagement, workflow design, and program evaluation. It includes checklists, planning guidelines, and tools to help teams design a customized implementation strategy for their institution.

Healthy lifestyle behaviors, including a balanced diet, regular physical activity, adequate sleep, avoiding tobacco, moderating alcohol consumption, and stress management, are associated with reduced risk of chronic disease and improved well-being. In recent years, digital interventions have emerged as cost-effective platforms for promoting these behaviors, yet few have been integrated into services delivered by certified exercise practitioners (CEPs) or focused on multiple domains of health.

Surgical site infections (SSIs) remain a major cause of health care–associated infections, and early prediction is essential for improving patient outcomes. Machine learning (ML) has shown potential for SSI prediction; however, clinical implementation requires models that are both accurate and explainable. Despite recent progress in explainable ML, its clinical application to SSI prediction remains limited.

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Implementing digital health technologies is challenging because implementation is shaped by interacting technical, organizational, professional, and contextual factors. Although implementation frameworks such as the Nonadoption, Abandonment, Scale-Up, Spread, and Sustainability (NASSS) framework support understanding this complexity, translating them into practical tools for routine implementation remains difficult.

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are heterogeneous clinical states that may represent early or at-risk stages of Alzheimer disease (AD) and other dementias in some individuals. Improved characterization and risk stratification in these populations may facilitate timely evaluation and intervention. Electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive, cost-effective neurophysiological technique with high temporal resolution, holds significant potential for elucidating neural mechanisms and providing candidate neurophysiological markers associated with SCD and MCI.
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