App for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)

Literature as well as field observations in the clinics for medical gastrointestinal diseases in Odense and Esbjerg indicate that patients find it difficult to maintain close contact with the health personnel. For some patients, this is caused by long waits in between appointments at the clinic as well as difficulty in coming through by phone. They may feel blocked from consulting about worsened symptoms, asking questions about medicine, symptoms or side effects or simply rearranging their appointment. This can make the patient feel alone with the primary responsibility for complex disease handling.

Studies point to E-health technologies as promising tools for close monitoring of patients with IBD. Studies also show that these solutions can help improve the quality of life for other patient groups with chronic diseases.

AIM

The purpose of this project is to develop and assess a module in the My Hospital app for patients with IBD. The module should strengthen their communication with the hospital staff and help improve their quality of life.

The project uses Participatory Design as its framework.

• Subproject 1: Using focus group interviews, the purpose is to explore how patients, nurses and doctors experience the current communication situation. They will be encouraged to suggest functions and content for the app, which could improve their communication.
• Subproject 2: The purpose for this part is to develop and test the app in creative workshops with patients, nurses, doctors and a computer engineer. Patients, doctors and nurses will also be interviewed individually to explore how the app can support the respective groups.
• Subproject 3: This part will retrospectively characterise the patients using the app and describe their use. An additional purpose is to prospectively describe possible connections between how the patients use the chat function and how they would describe their own quality of life and the severity of their disease. Interviews will be conducted with two groups: patients who often use the chat function and patients who never use it, to understand in which ways they benefit or do not benefit, respectively.

PARTNERS

The project is carried out at the Department of Gastroenterology at Odense University Hospital and the department for Medical Gastrointestinal Diseases at the Hospital of South West Jutland in Esbjerg, in collaboration with UCL University College. 

The technical solution is being developed in collaboration with Medware.

This is a PhD project by Janni Petersen Fallesen. Read Janni’s publications on sdu.dk.

Jens Kjeldsen is the main supervisor of the project.

EXTERNAL FUNDING

The project is financed by Takeda, TrygFonden and UCL University College.