Clinic-Based mHealth App Prods Patients Toward Colon Cancer Screening
Wake Forest Baptist Health is launching a five-year mHealth program that uses an iPad app to guide patients in clinic waiting rooms to schedule a colon cancer screening. And the platform follows up with them as well.
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By - Colorectal cancer screening isn’t pleasant, but it is vital. Now one health system is using an mHealth app to nudge along the estimated one-third of eligible Americans who have been avoiding what could be a life-saving test.
Wake Forest Baptist Health is using a $1.6 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to launch its specially designed iPad app in the waiting rooms of 28 primary care clinics in North Carolina and Kentucky. The connected health platform, called mobile Patient Technology for Health-CRC (mPATH-CRC), targets those in need of a screening, allows them to order or schedule a test of their choice and sends messages reminding them to take that test.
The five-year project tackles the challenge of engaging patients in what is usually a sensitive issue, and one that might not be easily broached during a face-to-face meeting. Instead, it targets patients when they may be most vulnerable to listening to a health-related message: In the waiting room of the doctor’s office or clinic.
And it uses a branded digital health platform to deliver that message.
"While hundreds of mobile health apps have been developed in recent years, the best strategies for incorporating apps in routine primary care remain unknown," David Miller, MD, a professor of internal medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Health, said in a press release. "Patients often have down time while they are waiting for their doctor. Our mPATH-CRC app makes good use of that currently wasted time by empowering patients with the tools and information they need to get the colorectal cancer screening test that is right for them.”
Miller was the lead researcher in a recent test of the home-grown app. According to a study involving some 450 patients and published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the app doubled the number of people who completed their screening.
Those results are important. Experts estimate more than a third of eligible Americans avoid the test, even though colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the US.
