Novel smartphone app for daily symptom reporting for active chemotherapy patients.

Abstract

e23119 Background: Clinicians, payors and patients are recognizing the value of enhanced symptom monitoring for ambulatory patients between chemotherapy encounters. However, enabling technologies to do so are nascent. Methods: A patient-facing Smartphone app and a clinician-facing dashboard were developed for providers to easily monitor key symptoms in ambulatory patients. Both EHR-integrated and standalone versions were available by provider preference. 250 patients with breast, lung or gastrointestinal cancer in active chemotherapy and their paired clinicians were recruited at three hospital-based practices to test the feasibility and usability of our system. Patients were prompted to report symptoms once per day Monday-Friday. Patients could also track their symptoms and obtain standardized self-care guidance at any time. Clinicians could access their patients’ data via the dashboard at any time. The treating team ould also receive e-mail alerts based on a pre-approved symptom triage protocol. Results: All enrolled clinicians and patients were able to access and use the technology. Clinicians accessed the symptom management dashboard at least once per weekday on average. 75% of clinicians indicated that the technology reduced their workflow somewhat or had no effect on it. The majority (71.5%) of clinicians indicated that the frequency of alerts they received was acceptable. 100% of clinicians who accessed the tool when integrated into the EHR indicated that the it was very convenient to use vs. only 20% of the clinicians who accessed the standalone version. 39.4% of patients reported using our technology on a daily basis. 77.9% of patients said that they would recommend the Smartphone App. Conclusions: The CarePrompter electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) monitoring system demonstrated high technical feasibility and usability, particularly when integrated with the EHR, suggesting that technical barriers to providing robust real-time and historical symptom data are less formidable than they appear.