Smartphones have an ever-growing role in our daily lives and every day new applications are released. The healthcare industry is not an exception and the number of so called “mHealth Apps” (mobile Health Apps) is constantly growing. These new applications open new possibilities and could change the way patients and healthcare providers interact with each other. The pain center of the CHUV in collaboration with the HESAV developed a smartphone App (DolorApp) allowing to track the evolution of the intensity of pain on the numeric rating scale after a prognostic or diagnostic pain management procedure. The aim of this study is to assess the acceptance of the DolorApp smartphone application by patients.
The study is divided in two parts. The first part retrospectively and prospectively evaluates the patient’s adherence and compliance to the DolorApp smartphone application. The second part prospectively evaluates the satisfaction of patients using the DolorApp application by the means of a short phone survey.
We found that a mean number of 80.7% of pain assessments were filled out by the patients in the retrospective group with this number being 72.9% in the prospective group. Furthermore we found that in the retrospective part, the mean response time (±SD) between the appearance of the push notification on the smartphone and the patient entering a pain assessment was 19.78 (±6.95) minutes whereas in the prospective part this value was 23.53 (±12.40) minutes. The mean response time did not differ statistically at different times of the day or between patients over or under 65 years of age. Overall patients were satisfied when asked about the DolorApp but an issue with the push notification function was reported mostly by patients using an iOS device.