Electronic symptom reporting by patients: a literature review.

A literature review has been conducted to gain an overview of which technologies and patient groups have previously been employed in scientific studies with regard to patients reporting symptoms electronically. This paper presents preliminary results from the review, based on the abstracts from relevant publications. The Medline database search identified 974 publications. Of these, 235 (24%) met the inclusion/exclusion criteria. The number of studies has increased heavily over the past two decades. A lot of the studies are small with regard to sample size, but we see that the number of studies increase over time. Cancer and lung diseases are the largest diagnosis groups. Cancer symptom reporting seems to take place inside the healthcare institutions, while lung disease and musculoskeletal disease reporting mainly take place at home via Internet.