Would patients undergo postoperative follow-up by using a smartphone application?
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Would patients undergo postoperative follow-up by using a smartphone application? Julian Scherer1* , Frank Keller2, Hans-Christoph Pape1 and Georg Osterhoff1,3
Abstract Background: eHealth applications have been proposed as an alternative to monitor patients in frequent intervals or over long distances. The aim of this study was to assess whether patients would accept an application on their smartphone to be monitored by their physicians. Methods: During September 2017 and December 2017 a survey amongst smartphone users was conducted via paper and web-based questionnaires. Results: More than half of the 962 participants (54%) were older than 55 years of age. The majority of the participants (68.7%) would accept a follow-up by a smartphone application obtaining personal healthcare data. 72.6% of all patients older than 55 years of age would use the application. The most prevalent reason against installing the application was data protection. Patients being currently treated in an orthopaedic practice and pedestrians were more eager to accept a follow-up by a mobile app than participants from social media. Conclusion: The majority of participants would accept a mobile application, collecting personal health-related data for postoperative follow-up, and saw a direct benefit for the patient in such an application. Keywords: mHealth, eHealth, Smartphone application, Follow-up, Big data
Background Today, the majority of people, including the elderly living in developed countries have access to a smartphone. In the USA, 42% of all people who are over the age of 65, own a smartphone [1] and in the European Union, 23% of people who are older than 64 years used a smartphone to access the internet in 2016 [2]. Smartphone health applications have become popular on several common smartphone operating systems. In a survey of 1604 smartphone users in the USA, 58% had downloaded a health-related application on their smartphones in 2015 [3]. eHealth applications can be used as a cost-effective and comfortable instrument to * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Traumatology, University Hospital Zurich, Raemistrasse 100, 8091 Zurich, Switzerland Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
transfer patients’ medical data to their treating physicians, even over long distances. They can be easily implemented in order to obtain patient-related recovering data after e.g. orthopaedic surgery [4]. Telemedicine can lower consultation duration and distance travelled by the patient significantly and therefore can help patients accessing the health care system [5, 6] and up to 60% of orthopaedic surgeons in the USA would implement telemedicine in orthopaedics as a follow-up tool in patients who live far away [7]. Furthermore, there are several other studies of various surgical disciplines showing the benefit of telemedical surgical aftercare and follow-up [6, 8–12]. However, little is known as to, whether patients would accept to have their personal health-related da
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