Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Sep 3, 2024
Date Accepted: Jul 23, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Metastatic Breast Cancer mHealth App to Promote Patient-Provider Communication: Protocol for a Usability and Satisfaction Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mobile health (mHealth) applications can enhance patient-provider communication, playing a crucial role in the diagnosis, treatment, quality of life, and outcomes for patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC).
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:
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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