Table 1.

Joint display of qualitative and quantitative results.

Topic	Subcategory	Content	Examples	Survey Results		Factor
				Rank	Mean Importance (Variance)
Need for high quality studies including specific outcome measures	Study Designs	More rigorous RCTs [34,35,36,38,39,40];	“This indicates that future studies should consider some essential criteria, including a sufficient number of participants and duration time, concealment and randomization procedures, blinding of the assessor, and low attrition rates [38].”	9	5.21 (0.96)	I
		Studies with higher number of participants [28]		15	5.08 (0.95)
		Pragmatic Study Designs [41]	“The long-term effects (>1 year) of diabetes apps are still unknown and need to be investigated in more pragmatic observational studies [41].”	13	5.04 (0.92)
	Long-term effects	Longer follow-ups [29,36,41,46,47]	“Future well-designed intervention studies with adequate length of follow-up are required to assess these important endpoints [45].”	5	5.05 (0.95)
	Costs/cost-effectiveness	Analyses of cost-effectiveness [28,30,34,35,41,42,43,44]	“In future studies, helping decision makers prepare well-informed reimbursement decisions by analyzing cost-effectiveness and safety is recommended [30].”	11	4.97 (1.07)	II
		Analyses of changes in health service use [34,45].	“Because of a lack of studies, conclusions cannot be drawn about effects on mortality and hospitalizations [45].”	7	4.64 (1.87)
	Adherence to reporting standards	Adherence to reporting standards [45]	“The application of the TIDieR checklist highlights a need for better reporting of telehealth interventions, because many trials did not report important logistical data relating to intervention conduct [45]”.	12	4.81 (1.62)
		Effect size estimations [48]	“We suggest to authors of future intervention studies, particularly with baseline imbalance, to report detailed information that allows authors of systematic reviews to calculate ANCOVA effect size estimates or, ideally, to provide access to IPD [48].”	-1	n mentioned 1/n total
					24/27
		Intervention uptake [40]	“Future studies should report specific details relating to uptake and engagement of the participant with the intervention, the application (including process of nutrition data entry and use of a database) and the involvement and role of clinicians to enable reproducibility and comparison with other applications and studies [40].”	-1	18/27
		Role of involved clinicians [40]		-1	22/27
	User satisfaction and technology acceptance	User acceptance [38,39]	“It is important also to assess and understand users’ satisfaction with and acceptance of these apps [38].”	10	4.65 (1.24)
		Patient satisfaction [38,39]		4	5.3 (1.14)	V
Need for comprehensive technology assessment	Understanding the prerequisites, mechanisms and combinations	Analyses of intervention components [34,36,41,49]	“Future studies assessing the effectiveness of apps should focus on apps that incorporate more comprehensive functionalities, that are identified in this review as the most promising functionalities for self-management of hypertension, including self-monitoring, reminders and alerts with either automatic feedback or educational information or both [38].”	16	4.81 (1.9)
		Adequate Tailoring [36,42].	“This study has significant implications for future research. Investigating the effects of different tailoring strategies for diabetes self-management is important and future research should further explore the relationships between tailoring strategies and other intervention components [36].”	2	5.11 (1.83)
	Comprehensive assessment of features and functionalities	Basic Theories and/or frameworks [29,31,36,37,50]	“Future research should clearly identify and report the explanatory frameworks, mechanisms and theories for the social network interventions being tested [50].”	12 2	n mentioned/n total
					17/27
Need for in-depth considerations of patients’ characteristics and more diverse study populations	-	Improved understanding of patient characteristics [28,33,39,51]	“Future studies also need to examine whether certain patient characteristics are more likely to result in initiating and sustaining the use of diabetes apps [39].”	8	4.97 (1.68)	II
		More diverse study populations [29]	“performing studies in other countries and places is suggested [29]”	18	4.5 (1.61)	III
Ethics and Safety	-	Data security [39]	“Ethical considerations for the risk of data privacy also need to be carefully addressed [39].”	3	5.47 (0.94)	VI
		Patient safety [30,41,42,52]	“Safety issues such as hypoglycemia and other adverse events are being overlooked and need attention in future investigations [52].”	6	5.25 (1.27)	II
		Implementation strategies [56]	“Further research should be conducted to provide more valid evidence for the effects and sustainable implementation of telehealth [42].”	1	4.76 (1.3)	IV
		Evaluation of implementation strategies [42,55]		14	4.68 (1.56)
		Interoperability [55]	“(…) future studies need to integrate diabetes-related functions to existing technologies, such as developing diabetic apps, which could be directly installed into patients’ own mobile phones, rather than developing new types of phones [55].”	17	4.45 (3.07)	III

The joint display covers the categories, subcategories, their description and example quotes taken from the 32 included records. Ranks show the results of the survey. The following six factors (right column) were found: I = Evaluation of effectiveness; II = Diversity of outcomes and standardized reporting; III = Research Planning; IV = Implementation science; V = User-centered design; VI = Data security; ¹ Specific reporting standards were asked for in a separate question only applicable to those who found them important. 2 The item was part of the special question on reporting standards only applicable to those respondents who found them useful.