Optimising malignant pleural effusion care with digital health

Each year over 8,000 Australians suffer from malignant pleural effusion (MPE), including 1 in 4 lung and breast cancer patients and up to 90% of those with malignant mesothelioma. Survival is poor, readmission to hospital is common and symptom burden is high. Breathlessness is the major symptom, causing functional debility and frequently impairs quality-of-life (QoL) resulting in hospital admissions. Management of MPE is fragmented, variable and commonly involves multiple specialties. The overarching goal of MPE management is to achieve symptom relief with minimal intervention and without lengthy hospitalization.

The Pleura Medicine unit at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital proposes the development of a user-friendly smart phone/mobile application to facilitate the early identification of symptoms deterioration in patients with MPE via patient symptom monitoring, activity levels and self-reported patient-related outcome measures (breathlessness and quality of life). The application would then initiate the MPE self-management plan as well as an alert to the health care provider (the pleural service) for an early clinical review.

The desired outcome is to reduce optimising symptoms and improving patient health-related quality of life and reducing hospital utilisation. We intend to achieve this by developing a model-of-care that utilises a smart phone application for the early identification and management of breathlessness in MPE patients. This will effectively enable assisted self-management in the ambulatory setting avoiding hospitalisation. Outcome measures to be assessed include those important to both patients and health services: Reduction in pleural related readmission rates within 30 and 90 days of discharge. Improving health care cost by reducing long term use of respiratory-related healthcare resources Improving Quality-of-life (including cost per Quality Adjusted Life Years [QALY])

Client


Contact: Prof Y.C. Gary Lee
Phone: +61 8 61510913
Email: [email protected]
Preferred contact: Email
Location: Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital

IP Exploitation Model


The IP exploitation model requested by the Client is: Creative Commons (open source) http://creativecommons.org.au/


Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
The University of Western Australia
Last modified: 15 July 2020
Modified By: Michael Wise 		UWA