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Abstract
Background Therapeutic adherence is the main variable in order to assess success or failure of any treatment. It is matter of interest to any clinician to get information enough about treatment response along time to reach a better understanding of any factor that conditions adherence failure or treatment interruptions. However, this kind of information is quite difficult to obtain in real scenarios due to lack of time or memory issues.
Objectives The aim of present study is to assess the opinion of users of a smartphone application developed to improve the follow up of patients with different rheumatic diseases.
Methods We conducted a survey to the users of REUMapp, an electronic form based on Google Form® software. REUMapp is an electronic interactive form developed for four different clinical scenarios: REUMapp-Esp (spondyloarthritis), REUMapp-Cristal (gout and othe microcrystalline arthropathies), REUMapp-AR (Rheumatoid arthritis) and REUMapp-MSK (soft tissues). All forms were developed over the basis of paper forms previously used for the same purposes and to be checked on follow up consultation. Forms were designed to gather information about daily treatment adherence (binomial), daily modifications (categorical), adverse effects (categorical) and therapeutic response in terms of visual analogical scale. REUMapp-ESP and REUMapp-AR include also specific joint recounts and indexes. All the forms could be completed in less than 3 minutes by the patient or his/her care provider. Every form contents became part of a database easily accessible during the follow up visit in a summarized way. Between 2014–2016, 419 apps were installed in patients or care provider's smartphones from two non public rheumatology clinics of Madrid with fully consentient of them. A survey was send to every user at the third to twelfth month after installation who have had one follow up consultation at least and who previously used the paper forms. Survey was developed using a multiple answer scheme using visual 7-level horizontal Likert scales. Topics of the survey were as follows: simplicity, time consumption and usefulness. Surveyed patients also were asked for the usefulness of the paper-based form.
Results 205 Patients or care providers answered the survey. From them, 36 patients had diagnosed by rheumatoid arthritis, 23 by spondyloarthritis, 68 by gout or other microcrystalline arthritis and the rest by any other soft tissue rheumatisms. Following table shows the results of the survey. In the non parametric analysis of usefulness, the app was considered more useful than the paper format with a wilcoxon coefficient of contrast for paired data of -6.6589 (p<0.0001).
Conclusions The smartphone applications described in this study have a good acceptance among patients of care providers in terms of usefulness, time consumption and simplicity and they are considered more useful than the printed models.
Disclosure of Interest None declared