An App to Support Difficult Interactions Among Providers, Patients, and Families

Authors' disclosures of potential conflicts of interest are found at the end of this article. O ncology advanced practitioners are responsible for effective communication regarding diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment options. The Institute of Medicine's Report on Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care recommends that patients and their families be provided understandable information and decision aids to per-sonalize information at key decision points along the continuum of cancer care (Institute of Medicine, 2013). One of the most challenging aspects of clinical care is sensitive and timely communication with patients and families. With the explosion of applications (apps) for oncology providers (Doyle-Lindrud, 2014), there is an opportunity for increased technology use to facilitate patient/fam-ily caregiver communication. The range of mobile health, or ''mHealth,'' apps is impressive, spanning care delivery, monitoring , diagnostics, training, and more 2014 study on mobile device analyt-ics finds that device usage has proliferated and that clinicians tend to view mHealth tools positively. Clinicians indicate that future technologies will have a positive impact on their communication with other clinicians and patients (Healthcare Information Management Systems Society, 2014). Health-care technologies and patient care have evolved rapidly, whereas the communication utility and efficacy of mHealth technologies have lagged behind (Nagler et al., 2014). Too little is known about how health-care providers utilize these systems (Barakat, Woolrych, Sixsmith, Kearns, & Kort, 2013) and about how patient/provider communication can be supported with mHealth technologies. Understanding the communication value of these technologies must move beyond a nascent area of research (Sherry & Ratzan, 2012). Communication skills training for providers improves the quality of life of patients and improves patient satisfaction with the quality