Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Sep 3, 2024
Date Accepted: Jul 23, 2025
Metastatic Breast Cancer mHealth App to Promote Patient-Provider Communication: Protocol for a Usability and Satisfaction Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the availability of more advanced and effective treatments, life expectancy has improved among patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC), but this makes communication with their medical oncologist more complex. Some patients struggle to learn about their therapeutic options and to understand and articulate their preferences. Mobile health (mHealth) applications can enhance patient-provider communication, playing a crucial role in the diagnosis, treatment, quality of life, and outcomes for patients living with MBC. Our team developed an app called My MBC Journey to focus on the collection of important information for patients with MBC between clinical encounters.
Objective:
This study will evaluate the usability and satisfaction of My MBC Journey, an app designed for metastatic breast cancer, to inform future modifications.
Methods:
This mixed methods study will assess patient use and satisfaction with the My MBC Journey to inform future app modifications and identify the barriers and facilitators to the app’s use for enhancing patient-provider communication. We will recruit a prospective, cross-sectional convenience sample of 25 patients with MBC and a sample of 15 members of the care team (i.e. caregivers, nurse navigators, and medical oncologists). Applying iterative, convergent mixed methods, we will conduct qualitative, semi-structured interviews with the patients and care team members. We also will collect quantitative data on usability through app analytics and standardized questionnaires (i.e. Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS), the Mobile Application rating Scale user version (uMARS), and System Usability Scale.). Qualitative interviews will be audio recorded and analyzed using NVivo® software to identify mHealth implementation themes.
Results:
The study’s results will inform future app design modifications and gauge preliminary effect size in support of future evaluations of the app’s efficacy in improving patient-provider communication.
Conclusions:
Our long-term goal is to improve patient-provider communication by developing mHealth apps that empower patients to collect and share clinically relevant, patient-reported information in a timely manner.
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