This article describes the second major phase of an intervention designed to enhance patient experiences during the critical transition from hospital to home.
A newly published paper from the the eHealth@hospital-2-home group outlines the protocol (plan) for the feasibility stage of a Nurse Assisted eHealth intervention that is delivered to patients with heart failure and colorectal cancer when they transition from hospital to home. In this feasibility study the usability of the nurse-assisted eHealth intervention is tested. For example, the plan is to explore if this intervention is feasible and acceptable to the patients. We will also explore the patients experiences of using the digital application, and their interaction with the nurses.
This stage of work is important as it helps the research team refine the project in preparation for a randomised control study.
Dr Ingvild Morken has led on this paper. She is the leader for this stage of the project. Ingvild is an intensive care nurse with 30 years of clinical experience from working with patients with cardiac diseases. She has also been project leader for several research projects on psychosocial aspects of living with cardiac diseases.
She explains, this paper is all about declaring our plan for the feasibility stage of the project. We know that the number of people with chronic illnesses like heart failure and colorectal cancer is rising. People with these illnesses are at high risk of being readmitted to hospitals and struggle with taking care of their illness while at home. We hope that the digital intervention we developed may help lower the burden associated with living with heart failure and colorectal cancer by helping to smoothen the transition from hospital to home.
The aim of this paper is to describe what our plan (protocol) is for this stage of the study. We planned to recruit 20 patients with heart failure and 10 with colorectal cancer from two different hospitals here in Norway. They will all be offered the use of a digital remote application call Dignio Connected care. The patients will access this system through an application “MyDignio” on an iPad provided to them for the duration of the study (30 days). We plan for 6 hospital-based nurse navigators to support patients through this application. Both nurse navigators and participants will be observed and interviewed around their experiences in using the eHealth intervention.
The researchers believes that this type of work is key in helping researcher ensure that the developed intervention and the plan for testing the intervention will work before starting the larger randomised control study.
The eHealth H-2-H team completed collecting the data from the feasibility study earlier this year and they are all working hard to analysis and write up the results from the study. PhD candidate Hege Wathne is focusing on the analysis of the interview and observation data of the nurses and participants in this study. Where the other team members are focusing on the results in the data collected by the digital application and the questionnaires participants were asked to complete.
Link to the full published protocol paper.
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