Mobile Health Could Be a Solution in Overcoming Challenges of Care in Patients Who Need Peritoneal Dialysis

Abstract

Background: For patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) who undergo peritoneal dialysis (PD) at home or in non-clinical centers, it is crucial to design and implement a hands-on self-care clinical decision aid system (CDAS). To this end, this descriptive work was done to determine the challenges in designing and implementing a mobile health (mHealth)-based self-care CDAS for patients undergoing PD in Iran in 2021. Methods: This qualitative study was conducted using in-depth semi-structured interviews with 20 key informants chosen by purposeful and snowball sampling. The data were analyzed through thematic analysis to extract the challenges in designing and implementing a mHealth-based self-care CDAS. Results: The challenges in designing and implementing a mHealth-based self-care CDAS for patients undergoing PD in Iran were divided into six major categories, including problems with insufficient training, patients’ visits to clinical centers, prompt access to data and information, data registration/documentation, distribution of PD specialists, and data analysis within the current system. Conclusions: The self-care CDAS for PD can be useful in many complicated decisions as well as when there is limited access to PD specialists. This system is efficient considering the widespread use of mobile phones, unfair geographical distribution of patients and PD specialists, and huge costs arising from visiting healthcare centers.