Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Feb 27, 2025
Date Accepted: Nov 26, 2025
Exploring Benefits and Barriers of Patient Involvement Through Digital Tools in Psycho-Oncology: A Qualitative Study Within the Reduct Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
This study examines digital collaboration between patient representatives and researchers in the development of e-mental health applications in psycho-oncology, focusing on the perspectives of patient representatives.
Objective:
This study aims to identify the benefits and barriers of digital collaboration in the development of e-mental health applications, and provide recommendations to optimize digital collaboration with patient representatives in psycho-oncology research.
Methods:
Conducted from July to September 2023, the study involved digital semi-structured interviews with five patient representatives from the Reduct trial, a multicenter randomized controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of the web-based psycho-oncological training Make It. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.
Results:
The findings highlight multiple advantages of digital collaboration. These include significant reductions in travel costs and effort, personal acceptance and preference for digital methods, enhanced flexibility and accessibility, a reduced health burden, increased efficiency, and scalability. Conversely, several challenges were identified: social impacts/impediments due to less face-to-face interaction, technical difficulties, compromised effectiveness and quality of communication, diverse personal preferences and acceptance levels, organizational issues, cognitive demands, socio-economic barriers, and safety concerns. The following recommendations to optimize digital collaboration were identified: maintaining regular communication and information exchange, valuing and committing to the collaboration, employing diverse communication channels, ensuring comprehensible communication, integrating feedback, fostering openness and understanding, diligent documentation and record-keeping, and providing targeted training and support for patient representatives.
Conclusions:
These findings confirm and specify previously known opportunities and challenges of digital collaboration, adding crucial insights for its implementation in psycho-oncological research. This research contributes to enhancing patient-centered approaches in psycho-oncology. Clinical Trial: DRKS00025213, https://drks.de/search/en/trial/DRKS00025213
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Copyright
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