Summary
ONCOassist is a revolutionary new CE-approved smartphone app developed specifically for oncology professionals. ONCOassist currently averages over 2,500 active users per month. The application contains all the decision support tools oncology professionals need at point-of-care, freeing them from the need to conduct time-consuming online searches. Tools include useful formulas, prognostic algorithms, adjuvant decision support tools similar to adjuvant online, AJCC staging content, CTCAE v4.0.
Challenge
Time is a major problem for oncology professionals, who waste time searching the internet to find safe, validated information to aid them with their decision-making. Current apps on the market that are aimed at oncology professionals are not validated and thus under MHRA regulations should not be used for patient care. Also, UK Trusts and healthcare institutions around the world spend a lot of time creating local chemotherapy protocols and guidelines to circulate to their staff. Unfortunately many of them go unused as they sit within the hospital intranet in PDF format.
Objectives
Our service aims to provide advice for clinicians who are concerned about the most appropriate dose to be administered to individual patients; often where the patient is treated outside standard chemotherapy regimens. Over a number of years we have carried out drug monitoring for patients treated at different UK centres for various clinical situations. We can therefore often offer advice based on the knowledge we have gained from similar clinical situations. It is often seen as beneficial to monitor individual patient drug exposures, to adjust the dose administered over several days. We provide this service free of charge.
The service runs in parallel with national clinical pharmacology trials led by Dr Gareth Veal in Newcastle. These involve centres across the UK conducting studies to learn more about the relationships between drug exposure and pharmacokinetics and key clinical parameters, including response and toxicity. A number of trials are now focused on these ‘hard to treat’ paediatric patient populations. The overall objectives are to determine appropriate drug exposures in all children with cancer, and for the data generated to provide evidence for change in terms of identifying and implementing more appropriate dosing regimens for particular subgroups of patients.
Solution
A basic version of ONCOassist was launched in 2012 and developed over the next three years. This allowed the team to quantify which new tools were asked for most and therefore improve the product based only on what users wanted, rather than adding unnecessary tools or content. Following on from the above, we encourage feedback and carry out an annual user survey. There is a feedback feature option prominently displayed on our app and website homepage, and we regularly receive feedback from users asking for new tools’ features. We have received hundreds of feedback emails from oncology professionals over the last three years and aim to improve ONCOassist based on this input from our user base.
Results
The company became the third worldwide to get a smartphone app CE-approved (classified as a medical device). We have a commercial deal with the prestigious Clatterbridge Cancer Centre: ONCOassist is distributed to all of its staff and integrates their local chemotherapy protocols. We have raised over £100,000 in funding from Healthbox accelerator and Enterprise Ireland, won numerous awards and been featured in various tech and healthcare publications. The company also has an endorsement and licensing deal with ESMO (European Society of Medical Oncology), promoted to all 12,000 of its members around the world. We have been mentioned in talks by the Royal Society of Medicine and have been promoted as an app that should be downloaded by the Association of Cancer Physicians in the UK and MOGA (Medical Oncology Group of Australia). The app averages over 2,500 active users per month from countries around the world including Egypt, South Africa, Indonesia, Germany and Netherlands. User base is growing an average of 20% per month and on the Google Play Store ONCOassist has been rated 22 times (18 of which were 5 out of 5).
Learnings
We will replicate the work we are doing with Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in other Trusts across the UK. The integration of local chemotherapy protocols and treatment guidelines within the app has proved to be very successful. Our next app will be in the area of cardiology.
Evaluation
At the ESMO conference in Madrid in September 2014 ONCOassist was demonstrated to 93 oncologists, who were then followed-up with a private survey. 46.3% said the app was ‘excellent’ and 43.8% said it was ‘very good’. Well over 90% of respondents thought ONCOassist would be ‘extremely useful, ‘very useful’ or ‘useful’ in practice. Finally, 59.2% said they would use it almost every day.
