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PROsaiq

PROsaiq is an open source project enables Patient-reported Outcomes (PRO) in day-to-day oncology practice with MOSAIQ®. PROsaiq provides proven benefits to oncology patients. There is a lot of potential for further cancer care improvement and there are several exiting use cases to be explored. Thus, PROsaiq is far from dull...

Background

Patient-reported outcome (PRO) questionnaires measure patients' perception of the impact of a disease and its treatment(s) [1]. PRO information enhances patient-centred care generally, but is particularly useful in oncology where side-effects from treatment are common. Initially PRO were almost exclusively collected in research [2], however the advent of electronic PRO (ePRO) systems based on tablet or web technologies has allowed their use in clinical routine practice [3] and during survivorship [5]. Bennett et al. [4] name improvements in patient-provider communication and patient satisfaction, efficient clinic time utilisation and increased accuracy of symptom assessment as incentives for using ePRO as part of clinical routine. A comprehensive review [6] confirms these findings, while pointing out that evidence in other areas such as health outcomes, patient health behaviour or health system performance is weak or non-existent.

System

Thw initial version of the PROsaiq system has been developed at the Illawarra Cancer Care. It allows patients to populate assessments in MOSAIQ via a tablet application or browser-rendered form. This system was built with the aim of enabling and testing the above ePRO advantages in departments using the MOSAIQ oncology information system. The PROsaiq system uses a combination of existing open source components and custom-developed software to create a HL7 version 2 message, which can be imported into MOSAIQ.