Improving quality of life by promoting patient-provider communication and optimizing social support using a digital health platform.

Abstract

e13622 Background: The patient experience, including symptom burden, is often disease-specific and dependent on host factors, the environment, and the tumor itself. Patients with a previous diagnosis of breast cancer are often subjected to multiple and aggressive treatment modalities compounding the already existing symptom burden related to the disease. Digital health can potentially increase patient engagement, close communication gaps between patients and providers, improve providers’ ability to stratify patient populations and adapt services, enable patients and families to access convenient and cost-effective care, and improve decision-making by patients and providers. The primary purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate if the use of a digital health platform can improve quality of life in patients with breast cancer. Methods: Patients with diagnosis of breast cancer were enrolled in a nonblinded, randomized, controlled trial of a digital health platform in self-reporting and monitoring of cancer and cancer-treatment related symptoms compared with usual care. All participants were asked to register in an online mobile application called CancerLife. This novel cancer social network experience provides patients social support through their care journey while at the same time collects patient-reported outcomes displayed inside reports that they can share with their providers. CancerLife automatically randomized each participant and assigned them to the experimental or control arms. The control arm received usual care provided for in the clinics. This group did not have access to the social network, reports or any other intervention or digital tools associated with CancerLife. Participants were asked to self-report their quality of life using the European Quality of Life Survey (EQ-5) every three weeks. Participants in the treatment arm were asked use the CancerLife at least 1 times per week for up to 24 weeks. Participants were also asked to share their print-out report directly with their care team and were instructed to email the report to their care team via their patient portal. Welch’s Two Sample t-test was performed to measure any statistical difference in the mean scores within each group for each time period. Results: CancerLife users had significant improvements in their scores at 9, 12, and 18 weeks; the improvement at 15 weeks was not significant. By contrast, the control group did not have significant improvements in their scores in any of the time periods. Conclusions: Breast cancer patients who were users of CancerLife’s app have more improvement in their Quality-of-Life Scores than randomly assigned non-users. The improvements seen with the use of CancerLife center on two things: improving communication from patient to physician about symptoms and offering patients social support which creates emotional resiliency. Clinical trial information: NCT03094741.