Using mobile app technology for patient data capture and implementation.
317 Background: Mobile application technology has quickly become an integral part of clinical cancer care. While this technology is most commonly used as a point of care reference or educational tool, it may also be an effective method to capture patient data. The purpose of this project was to create a mobile solution for fast, point-of-care data capture and implementation, patient reported outcomes, to generate a patient treatment summary and provide data for cancer registry and clinical trials. Methods: Using the “MedDB app” (Bitwise Analytics) on an iPad2 (Apple) device, an application was developed to collect patient data following breast surgery for cancer. Collected data included elements required for pathologic staging using the American Joint Committee on Cancer TNM system (7th Edition) with the application deriving pathologic TNM and Stage Group. In addition, the type of breast surgery, lymph node surgery, and the expected next steps in treatment are coded for collection. Data are entered into the App in the clinic and transferred using a blinded code number to a web-based database. This database is then used to generate a patient surgical treatment summary and care plan, and is available for uploading into a research database. We then developed an individual patient App for their own personal mobile device. The purpose was to collect patient reported outcomes through their adjuvant care and surviorship. Results: The initial pilot included data entry on 20 breast cancer patients who had surgery prior to adjuvant therapy. The time to complete data entry was less than 60 seconds per case. Conclusions: Mobile communication devices are increasingly becoming key tools for clinicians. They are primarily used to search for medical resource information and the review of medical records. This pilot demonstrates the potential for use of mobile computer devices for collecting key data for clinical trials, the cancer registry, generating a patient treatment summary and care plan at the point of service as well as patient reported outcomes through personalized patient apps. Future development will include studies of integration with the electronic health record, the cancer registry systems, and expansion to a complete survivorship care plan system.