A group of Keio University and Teikyo University has developed a system to collect information on the health status of patients and side effects of drugs using LINE, an SNS tool, and clarified its usefulness through clinical research.
Patient complaints about symptoms and side effects of drugs have been reported to tend to be underestimated by physicians.Therefore, attempts to collect patient's own subjective evaluations (PROs: Patient Reported Outcomes) and reflect them in medical care have begun to be introduced mainly in Europe and the United States.
Especially in recent years, the development of ePRO (electronic PROs) systems that collect PROs by digital devices is progressing, but since most of them are dedicated applications, proficiency in application operation has become a major hurdle for patients including the elderly. It is said that there is.
On the other hand, LINE is a communication app that is started on a daily basis by people of all ages, with more than 9,000 million people in Japan (as of December 2021).Therefore, by using LINE as a client application, this group has built an ePRO acquisition system that does not require proficiency in operation, and invited 12 breast cancer patients undergoing drug therapy to participate in the study, and is eligible for this system. A feasibility test was conducted to examine sex.
In this system, questions in a format compliant with PRO-CTCAE, which is an international guideline for evaluating side effects of anticancer drugs using PROs, are periodically sent to the patient's LINE and answered with a simple tap operation. It is possible to do it.As a result of the verification, the response rate of patients to the question was 95.5%, which was extremely high compared to the response rate (about 68-75%) in the same clinical study using a dedicated application conducted overseas. The number of responses from patients aged 60 years and over was also significantly higher, suggesting that they could be used satisfactorily regardless of age.
This research clarified the superiority of the ePRO acquisition system using LINE, an SNS tool that is used on a daily basis, and by contributing to efficient information gathering in medical care, a new type of medical care that is safer and more secure. It can be said that it showed the possibility of providing it.
Paper information:[Cancer Science] Feasibility Study on Collecting Patient-Reported Outcomes from BreastCancer Patients using the LINE-ePROs System
