Perception of the use of digital innovations in primary health care in a medium-sized municipality in the state of Rio de Janeiro
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21727/rpu.v17i1.5768Abstract
Primary Health Care (PHC) has been a global focus since it was recognized that its advancement would lead to improved quality of life, with the belief that its actions would address the social determinants of the health-illness process. However, its development depended on the incorporation of new technologies that respond to the new way of delivering health actions. The objective of this study is to understand health professionals' perceptions of the digital innovations adopted in PHC, which have favored the multidisciplinary work process. This is an observational and exploratory study, qualitative in nature, conducted in a medium-sized municipality in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Nine health professionals assigned to two PHC units were interviewed, with recurrence of responses serving as the limiting parameter for the subject group, a possible approach in qualitative studies. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered with open-ended questions that allowed participants to express their opinions on the topic, and the theoretical framework adopted for data interpretation was content analysis. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee under number CAAE 67654223.3.0000.5290. During the analysis process, two categories emerged: innovations in healthcare, which encompass user service hours, the implementation of the expanded clinic concept, the size of the enrolled population, and accessibility; and digital innovations, which involve the lack of communication tools, the use of digital medical records, and telehealth. Although healthcare services adopted innovations in both categories after the COVID-19 pandemic, this study identified only two innovations in PHC: accessibility between professionals and users and the use of electronic medical records. It can be concluded that these two innovations were already present in the official documents of the National Primary Care Policy and are therefore no longer innovative today. What was expected as innovation driven by the pandemic and digital advancement, such as telehealth, was not present in the reported perceptions.
Keywords: Health Innovation; Digital Health; Primary Health Care.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Lucas Ribeiro Santa Anna, Matheus Santos de Macedo Soares, Marcos Alex Mendes da Silva
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows sharing the work with acknowledgement of authorship and initial publication through this journal.
This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt and create upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. It is the most flexible license of all available. It is recommended for maximizing the dissemination and use of the licensed materials.
Authors are permitted to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. by posting it to an institutional repository or as a chapter in a book), with acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
See the full legal text of the license at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
