Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. Cancer-treatment toxicity is common and symptoms must be identified quickly and accurately.
Here, to meet the oncological-healthcare needs of our region, we developed QuestOnco, a mobile-phone ePROM application. The cohort study was conducted in a tertiary-care hospital in and consisted of two stages. Stage I assessed the comprehensibility of QuestOnco for patients: 24 cancer-therapy patients were asked to try the application for 30 min and then underwent semi-structured cognitive interviews. Few remarkable discrepancies were observed. The QuestOnco application was well-understood by patients and demonstrated good content validity compared to its parent PROM and the medical records.
Recent advances in cancer treatment have considerably increased the overall survival of patients [ 1 ]. However, cancer treatment often associates with significant and potentially life-threatening toxicity [ 2 , 3 ] that can lead to poor treatment compliance, impaired quality of life QoL , increased need for supportive care and hospitalizations, and greater costs [ 4 β 6 ].
Therefore, patients should be closely monitored for the emergence of treatment-related symptoms. However, it is increasingly understood that symptom reporting during such consultations is suboptimal due to time limitations and oncologist and patient biases [ 8 ]. PRO-CTCAE has been successfully tested for reliability, validity, and its ability to detect change over time [ 10 ] and is considered the gold standard for patient self-reporting of chemotherapy-related adverse events [ 11 ].
In recent years, there has been a healthcare shift from traditional inpatient care to cancer treatments that are administered by the patients themselves at home. To facilitate this, multiple innovative technological systems that can affordably provide remote monitoring with PROMs have been proposed [ 13 β 17 ]. These electronic PROM ePROM systems include questionnaires that can be completed online, telephone-based interactive voice-response systems, and interactive smartphone, tablet, or home-computer applications.
