Abstract CN8
Background
App features are becoming increasingly common in society and in Health Care as well even though Health Care has more to contribute to this area. Our patients often ask for digital way of communicating with us and as a part of this we discussed implementing a digital way of symptom reporting from chemotherapy treatment.Today, the contact nurses call the patients two days before the booked time for chemotherapy. They then do a symptom check to ensure the patient is ready for treatmentThis way of working is time-consuming for the nurses and it is not always that the patients respond, which leads to us having to call the patients several timesPatients are also not in a place where it is appropriate to discuss their side effects and other problems. We wanted to test whether reporting symptoms via an app could replace the phone calls to patients. We also wanted to investigate whether patients felt that they received answers to their questions and that they were able to adequately report their symptoms.
Methods
In August 2021, a reporting template was prepared with different response options to the respective symptoms. If they report, for example, nausea, follow-up questions will be asked for that symptom.Reporting template contains few free text fields to make it easier to export to the patient record.In November 2021, the first digital symptom checks were sent via the app. The symptom check was sent to patients who were undergoing a cytotoxic treatment at outpatient clinic. All patients who reported digitally had to complete an evaluation questionnaire.
Results
Our preliminary results show that patients are satisfied with reporting digitally. 81% believe it's easy to report symptoms in the app. 81% believe they obtained accurate reporting of their symptoms. 12% wanted a nurse to call them instead. 94% felt they received the counselling they needed for their treatment by communicating digitally with the nurse.
Conclusions
We will introduce digital symptom reporting to more patient groups. The evaluation shows that patients are generally satisfied and believe that they can report their side effects correctly via an app. The evaluation of the project will be completed in June 2022.
Clinical trial identification
Editorial acknowledgement
Legal entity responsible for the study
The author.
Funding
Has not received any funding.
Disclosure
The author has declared no conflicts of interest.