JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Due to advances in cancer diagnostics and treatments, life expectancy after cancer and the number of cancer survivors are increasing. Symptoms and late effects frequently occur in cancer survivors, with a negative impact on functioning and participation in society. Digital health tools might be helpful to systematically assess symptom burden of late effects and rehabilitation needs.

Objective:

To present the planning phase, design and early development of the digital health tool CaReScreen. In additional systematic approach to digital health innovation is demonstrated.

Methods:

The development process of CaReScreen followed an iterative, qualitative and participatory design approach, guided by established frameworks for digital health development. The development process was informed by an exploratory qualitative work with 72 informants across Norway that identified systematic late effect assessment and rehabilitation service navigation as the primary unmet needs in the follow-up of cancer survivors. A 105-item PROM questionnaire (EORTC SURV100 supplemented with five QLQ-C30 items) was selected as the main assessment tool.

Results:

An initial prototype of CaReScreen was developed, consisting of a digital report presenting an original visualisation of the domains from the questionnaires. The visualisation was based on a traffic light scoring system, with green indicating low symptom-burden and high functioning, yellow indicating moderate symptom-burden and moderate functioning and red indicating high symptom-burden and low functioning.

Conclusions:

The CaReScreen Interdisciplinary team have developed an initial digital health tool prototype with the main aim of enabling systematic assessment of late effects and unmet rehabilitation needs.