Digital Literacy Training for Digitalization Officers ("Digi-Managers") in Outpatient Medical and Psychotherapeutic Care: Conceptualization and Longitudinal Evaluation of a Certificate Course.

Background: Digital tools, services, and information in patient care demand new competencies in outpatient care, and the workforce is faced with the need to deal with digitalization.

Objective: In a targeted certificate course (Certification of Digitalization Officers in Medical Practices and Psychotherapeutic Practices, Digi-Manager), medical assistants are trained to serve as digitalization officers, enabling them to implement the requirements of digitalized health care within their practices.

Methods: As part of an accompanying study, the course is evaluated by the participants, and the change in their digital literacy is recorded. We measured different knowledge, skills, and attitude dimensions at 3 different times-before, during, and after the course-and used ANOVA to examine significant changes.

Results: Digi-Managers started the course with an already high self-assessment of their digital literacy. Skills and knowledge increased significantly in all categories (cognitive, technical, ethical, and health information) from the initial to the final measurement, as did self-confidence in the use of general software and hardware. Positive attitude remained stable over the training period, and the course was rated very positively by participants across all areas.

Conclusions: Training programs on digital topics for health care professionals are necessary, and this certification course is a role model for successful further education through a mixture of theoretical knowledge transfer and practical application. Especially, the use of a digital maturity model and a digital laboratory was a unique and useful feature. Further research needs to go into alternative assessment methods of digital literacy, as the results suggest that self-assessment measures self-efficacy and confidence, rather than pure competence. Nevertheless, the increase in self-assessed competence suggests that the training was successful.