Web-based interventions in the clinical encounter in fertility care: a scoping review

There has been a huge increase in the development of new e-health initiatives, including interventions supporting the interaction between patients and healthcare professionals – the clinical encounter. This interaction can influence clinical decision making during a patient's workup or treatment process. This scoping review was designed (i) to display the current landscape of web-based interventions to support the clinical encounter, and (ii) to critically appraise their composition. A literature search of different electronic databases was conducted. The study interventions were required to be for infertile patients and internet based, including the clinical encounter. The selected studies were systematically appraised. Twenty-eight studies were included and divided into four categories: online platform (10 studies), telemonitoring (3 studies), teleconsulting (8 studies) and artificial intelligence (7 studies). The online platform and teleconsulting categories focused most on patient-reported outcomes, with positive results. The other categories focused on development and validation. In conclusion, this review shows a broad landscape of web-based interventions in the clinical encounter, for healthcare professionals and fertility patients. The teleconsulting and the online platform categories have the most ‘ready-to-use’ interventions. However, the actual implementation of the interventions was evaluated in only four studies, suggesting challenges with implementation research and the need for standardized implementation protocols.