Leah Lawrence

Cancer Nursing Today nonprod

Not all cancer self-management apps are equally beneficial to patients, a new study has found. Commonly these apps had content that included educational or informational behavior change techniques (BCTs) but lacked information and subjective quality.&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;Experts recommend that self-management support take a stepped care approach and begin with providing widely available, &lsquo;low-touch&rsquo; interventions to all patients,&rdquo; study researchers wrote. &ldquo;One promising strategy for disseminating self-management interventions is through mobile health (mHealth) technologies such as mobile apps.&rdquo;&nbsp;With this analysis, the researchers assessed cancer self-management apps and rated the quality using the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS). They also evaluated BCTs, which &ldquo;are a standardized approach to describing behavioral intervention content and include theory-based strategies that reflect the smallest observable and replicable behavioral intervention components,&rdquo; using Abraham and Michie&rsquo;s taxonomy of 26 BCTs.&nbsp;&nbsp;The analysis included 39 apps with an average of 5.85 BCTs and 3.54 cancer management BCTs.&nbsp;&nbsp;Three-quarters of the cancer management BCTs were included in at least one app, with most apps commonly including &ldquo;provide information about behavior health link.&rdquo; The other cancer management BCTs included were &ldquo;provide instruction&rdquo; (72%), &ldquo;provide information on consequences&rdquo; (69%), &ldquo;plan social support or social change&rdquo; (44%), &ldquo;prompt self-monitoring of behavior&rdquo; (41%), &ldquo;provide contingent rewards&rdquo; (21%), &ldquo;stress management&rdquo; (15%), and &ldquo;teach to use prompts or cures&rdquo; (10%).&nbsp;Based on these findings, the researchers recommended that &ldquo;health care professionals considering apps in their evidence-based practice select apps that incorporate both educational/informational and noneducational/informational BCTs relevant to the target behavior(s) and mechanism(s) of action.&rdquo;&nbsp;In addition, the analysis revealed that the overall app quality range was 1.69-4.20. None had excellent quality, demonstrating that &ldquo;there remain opportunities to advance app quality and content.&rdquo;&nbsp;The researchers acknowledged that this analysis did not look at app efficacy.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Reference</h3><a href="https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/OP.22.00491?role=tab&amp;journalCode=op" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Systematic evaluation of the behavior change techniques and quality of commercially available cancer self-management apps</a>.

Quality of Cancer Self-Management Apps Lacking

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Cancer self-management apps are widely used, but do they provide enough information? 