Previously submitted to: JMIR Biomedical Engineering (no longer under consideration since Jan 03, 2023)
Date Submitted: Jan 24, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Cryptographic Tokens as an Incentive Mechanism for Patient-reported Outcome Measures Surveys: a proof-of-concept
ABSTRACT
Background:
As Patient-reported outcome measures face challenges with low response rate on sur- veys, different incentive mechanism have been proposed to achieve a higher response rate. However, it seems that monetary incentives are the only mechanism with proven effect. Nevertheless, it is less likely to be used than other mechanisms due to the monetary cost.
Objective:
Explore a cryptographic scheme for incentives PROMs responses.
Methods:
In this research work, a cryptographic scheme for rewarding patients with cryptographic tokens is developed and implemented on the Ethereum test network.
Results:
The model is able to distribute decentralised tokens to patients who complete the PROMs in a fair, private, decentralised approach. The token can be further used by patients to exchange more healthcare services, encouraging more patients to participate in PROMs. At the same time, an IER detection method is built to improve the quality of PROMs, avoiding the healthcare provider paying for meaningless PROMs from patients who barely participate for incentives.
Conclusions:
This work shows that smart contracts on a decentralised platform is a feasible method to give incentives to patients for completing PROMs surveys. Future research should test this with real patients to measure the effect of such incentive system.
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Copyright
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