Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Cancer
Date Submitted: Feb 28, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 28, 2018 - Apr 25, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 30, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Usability, acceptability and usefulness of a real-time mobile health app to assist in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients with breakthrough cancer pain
ABSTRACT
Background:
Breakthrough pain is a major problem and a source of high distress in patients with cancer. We hypothesized that healthcare professionals may benefit from a real-time mobile application to assist in the diagnosis and monitoring of breakthrough cancer pain (BTcP).
Objective:
This study aimed to test the usability, acceptability and usefulness in real world practice of the mobile App INES·DIO developed for the management of patients with BTcP.
Methods:
The study consisted of a survey research among a multidisciplinary sample of 175 physicians who evaluated the mobile App after testing it with 4 patients with BTcP each (total of 700 patients). Digital profile of the physicians, use of the different resources contained in the app, usefulness of the resources, usability, potential improvements, intention to use, and additional resources to add were recorded.
Results:
96% of physicians were working in public hospitals. They had an average of 12 (SD: 7) years of experience in BTcP and almost all (99,43%) had an active digital profile. The functional scales ECOG and Karnofsky, the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Davis algorithm to diagnose BTcP were the most frequent used tools with patient’s sample and were assessed as very useful by more than 80% of the physicians. 90% answered that App INES·DIO was well designed and 94% would probably or very probably recommended it to other colleagues. 68% indicated that the report provided by the app was worth to be included into the patient’s clinical records. Most valued resource in the app was the recording of the number, duration and intensity of flares/day and baseline pain control to enhance diagnosis of BTcP. Additional patient-oriented cancer pain-educational contents were suggested to be implemented in future versions of App INES·DIO.
Conclusions:
App INES·DIO is easy to use and useful for physicians to assist in the diagnosis and monitoring of breakthrough pain in patients with cancer. Participants suggested the implementation of new education material about breakthrough pain. They agreed on the importance of adding new clinical guidelines/protocols for the management of BTcP, improving their communication skills with the patient, and introducing an evidence-based medicine video platform which gathers new education material on BTcP.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.