In general survival (OS) was poorer amongst clients with cancer who had restricted electronic wellness literacy, in accordance to study final results printed in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics.
Overall health literacy is the potential to access and comprehend wellbeing data and expert services to take part in conclusions connected to one’s very own health and fitness. Electronic health literacy involves getting in a position to retrieve and recognize well being information electronically. Constrained digital wellness literacy was outlined in this examine as the lack of an email address in the patient’s digital affected person document (EPR).
“The negative effects of restricted wellness literacy on the survival of clients with diabetic issues or continual heart failure has presently been shown, but to our knowledge, it has never been talked about in clients with cancer,” the investigators wrote.
Carry on Looking at
The study was a noninterventional assessment of older people handled at Centre Léon Bérard in Lyon, France, who experienced received a most cancers analysis between 2015 and 2017. The investigators acquired data on patients’ sexual intercourse and age, specified most cancers attributes and results, the presence or absence of an e-mail handle in the patient’s EPR, and no matter whether or not the affected person opened an account on the on the internet affected individual portal. OS was the most important endpoint.
The analysis incorporated 15,244 sufferers, 55% of whom were being females. The median individual age was 62 (variety, 19 to 103) years, and 35.5% of people experienced metastatic disorder. EPRs confirmed e mail addresses for 57.5% of people, and 26.4% had opened their affected person portal account.
With a median follow-up of 3.6 (variety, to 6.8) decades, OS was substantially superior amid sufferers who had an email handle in the EPR (P <.001). Multivariate analyses revealed various factors linked to worse OS, including de novo metastatic disease (hazard ratio [HR], 2.63 95% CI, 2.47-2.79 P <.001), male sex (HR, 1.27 95% CI, 1.15-1.41 P <.001), older age (HR, 1.02 95% CI, 1.02-1.03 P <.001), and lack of an email address in the EPR (HR, 1.63 95% CI, 1.33-2.00 P <.001).
“The absence of an email address for patients with cancer can be considered as a modern factor of fragility taking into account the prognostic impact on the OS of this population,” the investigators concluded.
Disclosures: Some authors declared affiliations with biotech, pharmaceutical, and/or device companies. Please see the original study for a full list of authors’ disclosures.
Reference
Heudel PE, Delrieu L, Dumas E, et al. Impact of limited e-health literacy on the overall survival of patients with cancer. JCO Clin Cancer Inform. 20226:e2100174. doi:10.1200/CCI.21.00174
This article originally appeared on Oncology Nurse Advisor