Remote monitoring for long-term physical health conditions: an evidence and gap map

Ref ID	1006
First Author	S. de Bell
Journal	HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE DELIVERY RESEARCH
Year Of Publishing	2023
URL	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK597759/
Keywords	• General medical • Low methodological quality • Telemedicine • Non-Cochrane reviews • Transparency • Protocols • Searching
Problem(s)	• Lack of supplementary searches beyond databases • Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided • Funding or sponsor of systematic review not reported • Risk of bias not incorporated into conclusions of review • Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality • No registered or published protocol • Intervention not described / defined
Number of systematic reviews included	72
Summary of Findings	From 17 included systematic reviews indexed across MEDLINE and nine further databases including Epistemonikos published between 2018 and March 2022. The majority of the 72 reviews in the map were of low quality (n = 33; 45.8%) of which 12 were of critically low quality (16.6%). In 56% of included reviews, the reason for low quality was the lack of a protocol. It was often unclear whether the risk of bias in other quantitative study designs or qualitative studies had been assessed adequately (70%). Many reviews had adequate searches but their search strategies were not rated as fully comprehensive (68%), as they did not search as extensively as possible, for example in the grey literature or the reference lists of included studies. Few reviews described the funding sources of studies (82%) or gave full details of excluded studies (71%).
Did the article find that the problem(s) led to qualitative changes in interpretation of the results?	N/A
Are the methods of the article described in enough detail to replicate the study?