For many patients, getting a prescription for a new medication often involves an extra step for their doctor: prior authorization (PA). This process, required by insurance companies, is intended to ensure safety and quality control. However, it can also create significant delays, contributing to provider frustration and, in some cases, negatively impacting patient care.

We are excited to introduce Mike Byer, our new Institutional Partnerships Lead dedicated to supporting university librarians. To help you get to know them better, we've prepared a Q&A session covering their background, goals, and how they plan to collaborate with the community.

Digital technology has become a lifeline for mental health support, offering accessible and affordable solutions for people who might otherwise have no access to care. However, simply creating a great digital platform isn't enough - you need people to use and engage with it. Without high adherence, even the most effective tool can't help those who need it most. This is particularly true for vulnerable and underserved populations, such as the millions of Ukrainian refugees displaced in the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Promoting the mental well-being of young people is a top priority for municipalities in Sweden and around the world. It’s seen as one of the most effective ways to ensure a high quality of life for future generations and manage healthcare costs. However, mental well-being is influenced by a complex web of factors, and different municipal departments often collect different kinds of data, making it difficult to get a complete picture.

eHealth holds a great deal of promise, offering solutions from virtual reality for pain management to wearable devices for continuous health monitoring. But turning these innovations into reality is far from simple. It requires a delicate and often complex mix of collaboration between different organizations, from tech companies and academic institutions to hospitals and government bodies.

Digital technologies have transformed the way we access information and services. In the world of parenting, they offer a powerful way to provide support to families, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, developing a program that works for diverse cultures and contexts is a complex challenge.

Dementia is a growing concern globally. Care partners - often friends, family, or other community members - play a crucial role, supplementing existing formal health systems and providing essential care for people living with dementia. They often do so without formal dementia education and with limited support themselves, leaving many care partners unprepared, overwhelmed, and isolated. This is a challenge that Dr. Anthony Levinson, a psychiatrist, professor, and e-Learning researcher at McMaster University, is dedicated to addressing.

Wearable activity monitors—those handy devices you might wear on your wrist or elsewhere on your body—are increasingly common in health research. They can offer incredible insights into our daily physical activity and even our well-being - but how accurate are they, especially for specific patient populations? This is a crucial question for cancer researchers and clinicians.

JMIR Publications is proud to announce a special initiative designed to champion early career researchers. This program offers a unique opportunity for emerging scholars to gain significant exposure and support in publishing their groundbreaking work.

The landscape of healthcare education underwent a significant transformation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when it came to students’ practice placements. These work-based training modules, where healthcare students immerse themselves in clinical duties under expert supervision, are not merely supplementary activities. They are the crucible in which theoretical knowledge acquired in university classrooms is forged into practical application and know-how, a vital bridge to becoming competent registered healthcare professionals. Completing a requisite number of hours in these placements is often a non-negotiable condition for licensure.