Background: Hypertension management is a long-term process that requires continuity, comprehensiveness, collaboration between patients and healthcare professionals, family involvement, and community engagement. Digital health applications may support this process; however, brief instruments tailored to the Vietnamese context are lacking for evaluating chronic disease management software from a family medicine perspective.
Objective: To develop an instrument for assessing hospital-based chronic disease management software among patients with hypertension according to family medicine principles in Vietnam, as a basis for subsequent validity and reliability testing.
Methods: The instrument was developed following a measurement instrument development approach, informed by the theoretical framework of primary care/family medicine, the Primary Care Assessment Tool (PCAT), its Vietnamese adaptation (VN-PCAT-AE), digital health guidelines, and the characteristics of hypertension management. Content was mapped to domains relevant to software-based chronic disease management and then converted into items that patients could directly understand and rate.
Results: The instrument comprises six domains: continuity of care, comprehensive care, care coordination, prevention and self-management support, family-oriented care, and community-oriented care. Each domain contains five items rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (“not at all true”) to 5 (“completely true”).
Conclusion: This preliminary 30-item instrument provides an initial measurement framework integrating the assessment of digital health software with family medicine principles of care in hypertension management. Content validity, comprehensibility, reliability, and construct validity should be further evaluated among patients using the software before widespread use is recommended.