Practical implications
At the time of data collection, the physicians were using digital innovation for approximately 60% of the patients who could potentially derive benefit from it. This indicates that the application was not yet fully implemented. This observation may have practical implications for developing implementation strategies for respondents who have not used digital innovation actively, have only used it infrequently, or have not even begun implementing it. Insights into the specific beliefs about the effectiveness of the innovation allow inferences to refine the initial qualitative model of the configuration of context, mechanism, and outcome (see Fig. The employees of primary health care organizations should be encouraged to develop a high readiness for change and to be prepared to perform new tasks. Innovation developers must understand which topics are relevant from the physicians’ perspective, so that the physicians will perceive innovation as effective and adopt it (mechanism [reasoning] → outcome). Physicians need digital innovation that sensitizes them to the risks of polypharmacy, creates a learning effect, and provides valuable and helpful information for practice (mechanism [resources]). Beyond that, digital innovation must serve to reassure and support clinicians in ambiguous decision and communication situations with polypharmacy patients, when (de-) prescribing medications (context → mechanism [reasoning]). Organizations or researchers can use these findings to adapt primary care digital innovation and implementation strategies to improve digital health technology adoption (context → mechanism [reasoning + resources] → outcome) for polypharmacy management [