Background

In Scotland, prostate cancer accounts for 20.8% of all cancers diagnosed in men and an estimated 1 in 10 men develop prostate cancer during their lifetime. Each year over 3,000 Scottish men are diagnosed with it. To improve the support and outcomes of cancer, the Scottish Government has produced their “Beating Cancer: Ambition and Action” document (2016). The strategy highlights the need for solutions to enable people living with cancer to access their own data to support and facilitate self-management and for clinicians to have direct, real-time access to cancer data.

OWise prostate cancer (OWise PC) addresses these issues. Like our award-winning, mobile app platform OWise breast cancer, OWise PC is aimed to be a similar game-changer by empowering patients during treatment and improving the patient-physician interaction, while the anonymised real-time Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) data are investigated using advanced data-analytics to improve oncology outcomes.

Goals

In collaboration Maggie’s Centres, Prostate Scotland and the hospitals of West of Scotland Cancer Network, we are conducting a series of workshops with patients and clinicians to co-design specific features and content of OWise PC. This will lead to the development of an advanced prototype of the OWise PC mobile app and website with a range of tools, previously shown to have beneficial effects on cancer patients.

An early study with OWise for breast cancer found that 90% of patients and clinicians would recommend OWise to other patients, OWise PC may give users more control, support self-management and empower them to take action when necessary.

Features, based on newly-developed algorithms and data-analytics using PRO-data, will include personalised medical information based on the guidelines for the treatment of their type of cancer improving disease knowledge and patient experience; easy to use side-effect and symptom tracking tools to monitor wellbeing which will nudge them when their health deteriorates and they need to seek medical support; and a sharing function activated by patients to share their real-time PRO data with clinicians directly via the hospital IT system.

Why Healthier Lives Data Fund?

Working with the Healthier Lives Data Fund will be very exciting for us as Nesta has great expertise in delivering impact on vulnerable groups of individuals in our society. The focus of the fund on using data to improve the wellbeing and health outcomes of people will be highly complementary to our expertise and work centred on improving the lives and clinical outcomes of people living with and beyond cancer.