A Mobile Cancer Follow-up Care Plan for Patient Empowerment

Abstract

An increasing prevalence of cancer requires new ways of supporting outpatients and improving their compliance to treatment. Initial mostly surgical treatment is followed by long-term surveillance to detect and treat cancer recurrence timely. Depending on the tumor stage, the frequencies of follow-up appointments differ and the patient has to remember to make these appointments at the right time. Currently, the patient receives a paper-based schema indicating the follow-up schedule. Since this document is difficult to understand or may get lost, patients are missing the follow-up appointments. This paper illustrates our attempt at exploiting mHealth to support the empowerment and awareness in outpatients by a mobile, bilingual app that supports variable cancer follow-up schedules. Installed on a mobile device, the app reminds the patient to schedule his appointments timely and provides additional information about disease and treatment. Equipped with additional functionalities for monitoring vital parameters, the app can be used for continuous monitoring. The usability was studied with nine persons. We conclude that the app provides a good basis for a successful product after realizing some extensions and improvements of the usability.

Understanding the process of patient empowerment and their well-being in the context of outpatient services

“…Healthcare providers should help to design healthcare systems that promote and facilitate support for the production of patient centric knowledge and to facilitate support to patient in home-care, by supporting patients in their process of building empowerment for non-chronic illness. Ideally, the involvement of healthcare professionals is vital, and their role should be to facilitate rather than dominate (Akeel and Mundy, 2019;Denecke et al, 2017;Garcimartin et al, 2017). This study has suggested that patient empowerment needs to be better understood as an interactive and participative process between patients and their interacting agents (e.g.…”

“…This term has most often been studied to show how patients assert greater control over their own health within the healthcare centric designed system of empowerment (Boudioni et al. , 2018; Denecke et al. , 2017; Tartaglione et al.…”

“…Studies have shown that patient empowerment begins with information search about one's own illness, make choices about care and participate in treatment decisions and able to take responsibility for their own healing (Chang, 2020;Lau, 2002). This term has most often been studied to show how patients assert greater control over their own health within the healthcare centric designed system of empowerment (Boudioni et al, 2018;Denecke et al, 2017;Tartaglione et al, 2018). Little is known about the journey of how patients are empowered within their place-based social contextual environment, and how healthcare management can design patient empowerment strategies from the patient domain and extend them outside the clinical setting.…”