MINI REVIEW article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Health Informatics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1636469
This article is part of the Research TopicReshaping Health Informatics: Enhancing Digital Tools and Human Services through DesignView all articles
Increasing the inclusivity of digital health co-production: An integrative review of the latest evidence
Provisionally accepted
Ian Litchfield1,2*
Gayathri Delanerolle1,2Helen Juffs3Stephanie Bloxham3Sian Dunning4,5,6Lorraine Harper1,2,5- 1University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 2Birmingham Health Partners, Birmingham, United Kingdom, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 3Birmingham Voluntary Services Council, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 4West Midlands Health Innovation Accelerator, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 5University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 6Medical Devices Testing and Evaluation Centre, Birmingham, United Kingdom
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Co-production is increasingly being used to develop sustainable improvements in health service delivery that are shaped by the experiences and needs of a diverse range of stakeholders including patients and healthcare providers. The process also offers a compelling means of fundamentally addressing the key issues of acceptability and applicability of digital health tools that contribute to ongoing inequity in the use of digital health technologies. However, creating and moderating hybrid digital health co-production teams is hindered by heightened obstacles to inclusivity and equitability of the cost and complexity of digital healthcare, and the diverse digital experience amongst the relevant stakeholders. With previous examples of co-production that involve direct interaction between developers and diverse groups of patients and staff rare, this integrative review has collated the latest evidence on engaging these diverse stakeholders in healthcare innovation, with best practice in co-production, and presents it within a framework representing the five core steps of co-production: Set-up, Discovery, Definition, Development, and Delivery. This guidance includes structured and tailored training in co-production and the concepts of digital health, surfacing and challenging existing assumptions around data security and confidentiality, defining funding models, introducing and refining protypes of increasing sophistication, and structured implementation and evaluation of both the co-production process and its outputs.
Keywords: Digital Health, Digital Inclusion, Co-production, health inequalities, patient engagement
Received: 27 May 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Litchfield, Delanerolle, Juffs, Bloxham, Dunning and Harper. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ian Litchfield, i.litchfield@bham.ac.uk
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.