Keeping Digital Care Human

More and more people are caring for family members, and an increasing number are turning to digital services for support. Yet effective counselling is about far more than providing accurate information. It depends on empathy, guidance and making people feel genuinely heard. Researchers at Karl Landsteiner University (KL Krems) have explored how these human qualities can be preserved and actively strengthened in digital care settings. Rather than developing another app or adding new technical features, the team worked alongside a digital counselling service, helping its professionals reflect on their daily practice and learn systematically from shared experience. The result is a scientifically grounded approach that strengthens personalised digital counselling for family caregivers. At its core lies Practice Development, an established concept in nursing science that promotes continuous learning and improvement in professional practice.

As populations age, the number of family caregivers continues to rise worldwide. At the same time, digital counselling services are becoming increasingly important because they offer support regardless of time or location. While technology evolves rapidly, however, another question has received far less attention: how can we ensure that people remain at the centre of digital care while maintaining high-quality support? This is precisely where Practice Development comes in. Rather than relying on fixed procedures alone, it encourages professionals to learn from each other by reflecting on their work together and to continuously refine the way they support the people who seek their help.

Turning Experience into Knowledge

The researchers collaborated with the Austrian digital counselling platform Alles Clara, where nurses, psychologists and psychotherapists provide chat-based support for family caregivers. Because conversations take place asynchronously, users can remain anonymous and do not have to wait for appointments. Communication is mainly written – making every single word matter. “Counsellors kept noticing that sometimes a single sentence could make all the difference. Whenever a session had a particularly positive impact on a family caregiver, we wanted to understand why. Step by step, these moments of joint reflection became shared knowledge that everyone on the team could benefit from,” says Katharina Gabl, MSc, researcher at the Department of Nursing Science with focus on Person-Centred Care Research, KL Krems.

In this process, counselling practice itself became a space for learning. For example, when a particular phrase proved especially effective in a counselling session, that experience was not simply filed away. Instead, counsellors brought these examples back to the group, discussed why they had worked and, if they consistently proved valuable, incorporated them into a shared counselling handbook. In this way, individual experiences gradually evolved into collective professional knowledge.

Growing Together

The handbook as a supportive tool was never intended to be a finished reference document. It evolved continuously as new insights emerged. Regular reflection sessions gave counsellors the opportunity to discuss challenging situations, while a dedicated Development Panel explored promising development strategies and evaluated them in practice. The counsellors themselves described this ongoing process as an opportunity to grow together, learn from one another and explore new ways of supporting family caregivers. “What impressed me most was how openly everyone shared their experiences. No one was expected to have the perfect answer. What mattered was that successful ideas did not remain with individuals but became part of a shared process that helped improve future counselling for everyone,” says Theresa Clement, BSc, MSc, also a researcher at the department.

The study drew on data from 1,263 users and feedback from 342 counselling conversations. The findings illustrate the wide variety of issues people bring to digital counselling – from practical organisational questions to emotionally demanding situations. This diversity underlines why effective digital support requires far more than standardised responses.

People Come First

“Digital health services will become an integral part of future healthcare. That makes it all the more important that we value the quality of human interaction just as highly as technological innovation. This is exactly where Practice Development demonstrates its potential,” says Prof. Hanna Mayer, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at KL Krems. For the researchers, this is the central message of their work. The question is no longer whether healthcare will become digital, but how that transformation should be shaped. Their findings show that humanity does not have to disappear as healthcare moves online. With conscious reflection, continuous learning and a commitment to improving professional practice every day, digital counselling can become not only more accessible but also more personal. This is the essence of Practice Development. Through research such as this, KL Krems combines scientific excellence with practical solutions for tomorrow’s healthcare, demonstrating how digital innovation and person-centred care can advance hand in hand.

Original publication: Packing for the journey: translating practice development into the digital realm, K: Gabl; H: Mayer; T: Clement, Frontiers in Health Services6:1797479, 2026, doi: 10.3389/frhs.2026.1797479. Packing for the journey: translating practice development into the digital realm - Karl Landsteiner Privatuniversität