Following a cancer diagnosis, patients face a series of challenges. They have to make difficult decisions about treatments, deal with an additional daily burden and cope with fear and anxiety associated with a life-threatening disease. Cancer is a challenging experience for both adults and children, as well as their families, caregivers and friends as patients typically experience a variety of physical and psycho-emotional symptoms.
Preferably, these challenges will have to be addressed by a team of healthcare professionals specially trained in palliative care. The ultimate goal of palliative care is to improve the quality of life of patients that go through life-threatening diseases like cancer. For palliative care to be most effective, patients need to participate actively and communicate their personal needs as they arise.
To this end, healthcare providers also encounter many challenges while caring for patients with cancer. Communication with patients is quite challenging and it often requires a sensitive approach, starting with the announcement of the cancer diagnosis and all the way through to treatment courses and possible relapses. COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted all these challenges.
In recent years, digital health technologies advances have provided significant aid in various aspect of healthcare, including palliative care. These technologies are often used to build modern and powerful digital health platforms addressed to patients, their carers and healthcare professionals, connecting them virtually.
This is where MyPal comes into play, aiming to develop and test digital health solutions for palliative care in cancer patients focusing on the Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) paradigm supported via eHealth technical means, i.e. ePRO paradigm. In a nutshell, MyPal project builds and evaluates an eHealth platform that makes uses of modern digital technologies and methods to support cancer patients, their carers and physicians under real-world conditions. MyPal focused on facilitating patients to record and communicate their symptoms but also to improve their knowledge about their disease. Moreover, the MyPal platform promotes the active participation of patients in the management of their disease, including care decisions, and motivates patients to adhere to treatment via personalized messages.
Via the MyPal platform, adult patients can report their physical and emotional symptoms via their mobile phone/tablet device using the MyPal-ADULT app; children with cancer do so while playing the MyPal-CHILD game on the family’s tablet. There is also a smartphone application for the carers of the children, while the treating physicians are able to monitor patients and their reported information via the MyPal web portal.
The MyPal solution has been tested by cancer patients, their carers and their physicians in 7 clinical sites across 5 European countries.
Based on the conducted studies, the main conclusions is that while the use of eHealth technologies is identified as a feasible way to support the provided healthcare services with a positive impact on patient treatment, still, there are a lot of things to be done in order to apply it in wide scale. Key things to be highlighted are the need for better clinical professionals’ education programmes, better technical infrastructures and also improved reimbursement schemes to facilitate the uptake of eHealth tools as part of everyday clinical care.
