Cancer prevention, detection and treatment are changing fast. Oncologists from around the world, gathered at ASCO 2018, speak a new language. Why Doctor is sharing these new cancer words with you. Today: applications.
There are millions of apps now available, including hundreds of thousands in healthcare. However, only three of them have scientifically proven their usefulness. Among them, the one tested by a French team including Professor Fabrice Denis, radiotherapist in Le Mans. The results he reports are surprising.
Jean-François Lemoine: Are applications making their arrival in the world of cancer?
Fabrice Denis, radiotherapist in Le Mans, president of the society of radiotherapists oncologists: Absoutely. There are around 300,000 health applications available, but there are very few applications for severe diseases, such as cardiology or cancer. Of the 300,000, only three have demonstrated their ability to survive. Ours is one of them.
Jean-François Lemoine: Everyone can see more or less what the word application corresponds to. But in cancerology?
Fabrice Denis: an application in oncology, it is especially on the side of the patient that it happens. It’s a program that’s on a phone. By clicking on it, the application asks questions to the patient. She asks him to take stock of his state of health, his weight, his pain, etc.…
The data is sent to the medical team monitoring the patient. She analyzes these results, and if they are not good, the doctor is alerted. He then calls the patient, offering him a consultation or a CT scan, with the aim of detecting a possible recurrence as quickly as possible.
Jean-François Lemoine: Was this application developed to specifically monitor patients with lung cancer?
Fabrice Denis: Yes quite.
Jean-François Lemoine: Is your application as efficient as a scanner?
Fabrice Denis: It is at least as effective, since we have highlighted better survival with this follow-up than with the follow-up by scanner.
When you have a CT scan every two or three months, and you have symptoms, you tend to wait for the CT scan which is due in a month – which you should not do. When you wait two weeks, three weeks, six weeks, the state of health worsens, and you come to the scanner too tired to have a treatment that could have been much more effective if it had been prescribed a month before.
With our application, we start the treatments straight away.
Jean-François Lemoine: How can a patient obtain this application?
Fabrice Denis: His doctor prescribed him. He enters it in a file which sends him an email every week. By clicking on this email, the patient has access to the application.
.
