Are organizational ehealth interventions becoming more effective at addressing employee mental health; a systematic review and meta-analysis (Preprint)
OA Location
Author(s)
Type
preprint
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Mental health conditions are considered the leading cause of disability, sickness absence, and long-term work incapacity in most developed countries. EHealth interventions provide employees with access to psychological assistance. There has been widespread implementation and provision of eHealth interventions in the workplace as an inexpensive and anonymous way of addressing common mental disorders.
OBJECTIVE
The aims of this updated review were to synthesize the literature of the efficacy of eHealth interventions for anxiety, depression, and stress outcomes in employee samples in organisational settings, and evaluate whether their effectiveness has improved over time.
METHODS
Systematic searches in relevant articles published from 2004 - July 2020 of trials of eHealth interventions (App or web-based) focused on the mental health of employees. The quality and bias of all studies was assessed. We extracted means and standard deviations from publications, comparing the difference in effect sizes (Hedge’s g) in standardized mental health outcomes. We meta-analyzed these using a random effects model.
RESULTS
We identified a tripling of the body of evidence, with 75 trials available for meta-analysis, with a combined sample of n=14,747. EHealth interventions showed small positive effects for anxiety (g=0.26), depression (g=0.26), and stress (g=0.25) in employees’ post-intervention, with similar effects seen at the medium term follow up. There was evidence for no increase in the effectiveness of these interventions over the past decade.
CONCLUSIONS
This review and meta-analysis confirm that eHealth interventions have a small, positive impact on reducing mental health symptoms in employees. Disappointingly we found no evidence that, despite the advances in technology, the enormous resources in time, research and finance devoted to this area for over a decade, we are producing better interventions. Hopefully these small effect sizes do not represent the optimum outcome in organisational settings.
CLINICALTRIAL
The systematic review protocol was registered on PROSPERO: CRD42020185859.
Mental health conditions are considered the leading cause of disability, sickness absence, and long-term work incapacity in most developed countries. EHealth interventions provide employees with access to psychological assistance. There has been widespread implementation and provision of eHealth interventions in the workplace as an inexpensive and anonymous way of addressing common mental disorders.
OBJECTIVE
The aims of this updated review were to synthesize the literature of the efficacy of eHealth interventions for anxiety, depression, and stress outcomes in employee samples in organisational settings, and evaluate whether their effectiveness has improved over time.
METHODS
Systematic searches in relevant articles published from 2004 - July 2020 of trials of eHealth interventions (App or web-based) focused on the mental health of employees. The quality and bias of all studies was assessed. We extracted means and standard deviations from publications, comparing the difference in effect sizes (Hedge’s g) in standardized mental health outcomes. We meta-analyzed these using a random effects model.
RESULTS
We identified a tripling of the body of evidence, with 75 trials available for meta-analysis, with a combined sample of n=14,747. EHealth interventions showed small positive effects for anxiety (g=0.26), depression (g=0.26), and stress (g=0.25) in employees’ post-intervention, with similar effects seen at the medium term follow up. There was evidence for no increase in the effectiveness of these interventions over the past decade.
CONCLUSIONS
This review and meta-analysis confirm that eHealth interventions have a small, positive impact on reducing mental health symptoms in employees. Disappointingly we found no evidence that, despite the advances in technology, the enormous resources in time, research and finance devoted to this area for over a decade, we are producing better interventions. Hopefully these small effect sizes do not represent the optimum outcome in organisational settings.
CLINICALTRIAL
The systematic review protocol was registered on PROSPERO: CRD42020185859.
Date Issued
2022-03-07
Citation
JMIR Publications Inc., 2022
Journal / Book Title
JMIR Publications Inc.
Copyright Statement
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.
Publication Status
Published