The Effectiveness of mHealth and eHealth Tools in Improving Provider Knowledge, Confidence, and Behaviors Related to Cancer Detection, Treatment, and Survivorship Care: a Systematic Review

AbstractMobile health (mHealth) and eHealth interventions have demonstrated potential to improve cancer care delivery and disease management by increasing access to health information and health management skills. However, there is a need to better understand the overall impact of these interventions in improving cancer care and to identify best practices to support intervention adoption. Overall, this review intended to systematically catalogue the recent body of cancer-based mHealth and eHealth education and training interventions and assess the effectiveness of these interventions in increasing health care professionals ’ knowledge, confidence, and behaviors related to the delivery of care along the cancer continuum. Our initial search yielded 135 articles, and our full review included 23 articles. We abstracted descriptive data for each of the 23 studies, including an overview of interventions (i.e., intended in tervention recipients, location of delivery, topic of focus), study methods (i.e., design, sampling approach, sample size), and outcome measures. Almost all the studies reported knowledge gain as an outcome of the education interventions, whereas only half assessed provider confidence or behavior ch ange. We conclude that there is some evidence that mHealth and eHealth interventions lead to improvements in cancer care delivery, but this is not a consistent finding across the studies reviewed. Our findings also identify gaps that should be addressed in future res...
Source: Journal of Cancer Education - Category: Cancer & Oncology Source Type: research