Development of a Smartphone Application to Monitor Pediatric Patient-Reported Outcomes.

This paper is to document the development process of a smartphone app to track patient-reported outcomes (PROs) of children with chronic diseases, and to share the usability study results. A multidisciplinary research team including health services researchers, pediatric nurses, and software engineers worked synergistically in development. Group discussions and several rounds of feedback and modification were conducted. Ten pediatric patients, five parents, and two nurses participated in usability study. Qualitative content analyses were employed in development and usability evaluation. The app collects demographic information and PROs. The web-based administration portal helps to manage demographic information, questionnaires, administrators, and survey-conducting organizations. All participants felt this app was easy to use and the interfaces were friendly to children. Nurses thought administration portal interfaces were simple and data was convenient to download for further analysis. The app and administration portal have potential to promote PROs in assessing quality of life and symptoms in pediatric patients.