Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Feb 27, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 4, 2019 - Apr 10, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 18, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Patient Attitudes and Their Awareness Towards Skin Cancer–Related Apps: Cross-Sectional Survey
Background:
In the emerging era of digitalization and electronic health, skin cancer–related apps represent useful tools to support dermatologic consultation and examination. Yet, little is known about how patients perceive the value of such apps.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to investigate patient attitudes and their awareness toward skin cancer–related apps.
Methods:
A cross-sectional study including 200 patients from the oncological outpatient unit was conducted at the University Hospital (LMU Munich, Germany) between September and December 2018. Patients were asked to complete a self-administered questionnaire on the popularity and usefulness of health-related and skin cancer–related apps. A descriptive analysis was performed with the expression of categorical variables as frequencies and percentages. For continuous variables, the median and range were indicated. Contingency tables and chi-square tests were performed to investigate associations between sociodemographic data and selected items of the questionnaire.
Results:
A total of 98.9% (195/197) of patients had never used skin cancer–related apps or could not remember. In 49.7% (93/187) of cases, patients were unsure about the usefulness of skin cancer apps, whereas 42.6% (78/183) thought that skin cancer apps could supplement or support the professional skin examination performed by a physician. However, 47.9% (90/188) were interested in acquiring more information by their dermatologists about skin cancer apps. Young age (P=.002), male gender (P=.02), a previous history of melanoma (P=.004), and higher educational level (P=.002) were significantly associated with a positive attitude. Nevertheless, 55.9% (105/188) preferred a printed patient brochure on skin cancer to downloading and using an app.
Conclusions:
The experience and knowledge of skin cancer–related apps was surprisingly low in this population, although there was a high general interest in more information about such apps. Printed patient brochures were the preferred information source.
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.