Elsevier

Urology

Volume 159, January 2022, Pages 66-71
Urology

Female Urology
Development and Usability Testing of a Mobile Application to Monitor Patient-Reported Outcomes after Stress Urinary Incontinence Surgery

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urology.2021.10.011Get rights and content

ABSTRACT

Objective

To develop and perform a usability testing of a mobile application (app) with representative users of surgeons and female patients undergoing stress urinary incontinence (SUI) surgery.

Methods

A mobile app was developed with the Medical Device Epidemiology Network (MDEpiNet) High-Performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) to streamline the collection of patient-reported outcomes following SUI surgery using validated questionnaires. It was designed as a collaborative effort with the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), including patient and surgeon involvement. The app evaluation questions addressed the user's rating on the clarity and length of the questions and the comfort level in using the interface for patients to report post-operative outcomes and surgeons to review them.

Results

A total of twenty patients and 5 surgeons tested the mobile app and reported their experience and level of satisfaction. The average patient experience score was 9 out of ten, with ten being the best. Eleven patients (55%) were interested in replacing in-person follow-up visits with the app. The surgeons reported an average user experience score of 8.6 out of ten. Four surgeons (80%) were interested in replacing in-person visits with the app. The combined experience score between all users was 8.9 out of ten. Fifteen out of twenty-five users (60%) showed interest in replacing in-person visits with the app.

Conclusion

The mobile app for SUI captured important patient-reported outcomes with a high satisfaction reporting from patients and surgeons.

Section snippets

METHODS

The study was approved by the Weill Cornell Medical College Institutional Review Board (1911021104) for Human Studies and adhered to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all patients.

RESULTS

Twenty patients and 5 surgeons completed the questionnaires that were assigned to them in the mobile app. All surgeons completed an additional questionnaire focusing on their experience to explore additional aspects of the app. As the users filled in their responses, the HIVE engine monitored data entry and minimized inaccuracies by automatically populating values from previous pages and suggesting a list of variables for easy selection where applicable. Furthermore, time, and dependency

DISCUSSION

There is a substantial growth in mobile app users,14 with over 318,000 health apps available on app stores worldwide, and more than 200 apps being added each day.15 There is a paradigm shift in the delivery of health care recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic that encouraged virtual consultations through medical health apps for a safer approach without reducing care quality.16 A recent systematic review of 33 studies evaluating the usability of medical health apps found that although

Acknowledgment

This study was funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (U01FD006292) through the National Evaluation System for Health Technology Coordinating Center (NESTcc) test case sub-award number 6292-2020-R2TCB25-001.

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