Study of QOL Assessment Management Application

Abstract

NCCN guidelines recommend conducting QOL assessments that display the score of a patient’s quality of life, in addition tousing common assessment methods that simply diagnose the patient’s medical conditions. Despite the effectiveness of these methods in determining the QOL for cancer patients, their paper answer sheets have always had a fixed format. As a result, there has been almost no progress in the efforts to digitize the questionnaires to effectively manage data, and clinicians have been required to invest inordinate amount of time and effort into collecting the EORTC assessment data in order to apply them to research. Accordingly, in this research, we used preliminary surveys to develop an application that calculates and manages data for EORTC QLQ-C30 which are the most popular QOL assessment methods. For future application, we have integrated functions to display acquired assessment data to patients using visual graphs for easy viewing and comparison, as well as a feature that allows the user to import the data from the answer sheet by simply taking a picture of it. Also, introduced a function to improve patients’ motivation towards rehabilitation and encourage them to continue with rehabilitation. As a result, we succeeded in developing an application that reduces the burden of data input and analytical work on the clinician, that can present a graph that allows the cancer patient to immediately understand his or her medical condition while still showing consideration to the patient’s mental state, and has a function that encourages improvement in motivation for rehabilitation.