Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of home telemonitoring interventions for patients with chronic diseases: a critical assessment of their methodological quality

Ref ID 194
First Author S. Kitsiou
Journal JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH
Year Of Publishing 2013
URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23880072/
Keywords • Telemedicine
• Risk of bias
• Searching
• Grey literature
• Single reviewer
Problem(s) • Risk of bias not incorporated into conclusions of review
• Lack of supplementary searches beyond databases
• Grey literature excluded
• Single reviewer / lack of double checking
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• No quality assessment undertaken or reported
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Canada
Aim To assess the methodological quality (R-AMSTAR), and reporting characteristics of systematic reviews of home telemonitoring interventions in the context of chronic diseases published between 1966 and 2012.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Methodological quality was suboptimal in the 24 systematic reviews of home telemonitoring for chronic diseases published between 1966 and 2012. Areas of low adherence included: duplicate data extraction (42%), manual searches of highly relevant journals (13%), inclusion of grey (8%) and non-English literature (21%), assessment of the methodological quality of included studies (33%) and incorporation of quality in conclusions (25%).
Number of systematic reviews included 24
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 240
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description