Researchers: Ilana Dubovi¹, Michal Haskel-Ittah², Sharon Pelles Avraham³

Background: Telemedicine offers to change traditional face-to-face patient-clinician encounters to visits that are 'filtered' by distance and technology. This shift raises an opportunity to evaluate telemedicine digital channels instructional design to support patients’ education for self-management. This study focuses on different types of information: mechanistic knowledge about the rationale for treatment and procedural knowledge about the treatment regimen.

Objectives: Patients receiving chemotherapy were selected as a prototypical example of a health treatment that requires ongoing daily self-care.
The research aimed to assess the impact of mechanistic knowledge versus procedural knowledge, and the role of a digital patient education environment on patients' symptom management.

Method: The study involved 108 cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, who were assigned to either an experimental group (n=58) receiving digital patient education which provided access to both mechanistic and procedural information, or a control group (n=50) receiving only standard patient education. Participants in both groups a set of completed questionnaires regarding their knowledge, self-efficacy and confidence at the start of the study and after four chemotherapy cycles. Also patients reports on symptoms severity and reasoning were assessed. Data on emergency room (ER) visits were collected from medical records.

Findings: The results indicated that patients in the experimental group who received digital instruction demonstrated higher levels of both mechanistic and procedural knowledge, greater confidence in decision-making, lower perceived severity of symptoms, and fewer ER visits compared to the control group. Linear regression analysis revealed that mechanistic knowledge and decision-making confidence in addition to sociodemographic parameters, accounted for 21% of ER visits variance (P < .001). 67% of patients in the experimental group chose to access the mechanistic information in the digital environment.

Conclusions: The findings underscore potential of digital patient education platforms in supporting diverse types of knowledge, particularly mechanistic knowledge to optimize patients self-management.

Research end date: 09/2024