Dr. Guo on mobile health care plan for patients with kidney stones

In this video, Jenny Guo, MD, shares findings from the 2024 American Urological Association Annual Meeting abstract, “Development of a novel mobile health platform for surveillance of kidney stone formers: 6-month preliminary analysis.” Guo is a urology resident at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Transcription:

What were some of the notable findings of your study?

So far, we've analyzed our 6-month preliminary results. Unfortunately, we've had a pretty difficult time enrolling patients into this study; we've had about a 35% enrollment rate over the past 12 months. But interestingly enough, so far, at 6 months, we found that the GetWell patients have shown increases in their Wisconsin Stone Quality of Life scores, or the WISQOL score, of about 3 points from baseline to 6 months, whereas in the control group, patients actually showed a decrease of about 0.7 points from baseline. But given the low recruitment rate, we have a pretty low sample size, so these results aren't statistically significant. Looking at the 24-hour urine collection results, we found that the GetWell patients actually had increases in their urine volume from baseline to 6 months of about 0.35 liters, whereas the control patients didn't really show any change at all.

Do you plan to conduct further research on the care plan?

Currently, we don't have any future studies planned. But we're definitely thinking of ways to refine the usage of some sort of mobile application or mobile device because it seems like patients are interested in trying out mobile health technology. However, we still need to find better ways to streamline the process to make it less lengthy and less cumbersome to use. So for example, we're thinking of possibly looking into incorporating AI or reaching out to the engineering department to create our own application. That way, the patient doesn't need to log in to use the application to access their results, and they can hopefully, in the future, input their 24-hour urine collection results themselves directly into the app, and the app will analyze their results and give them customized recommendations, and then enroll them into a care plan that could theoretically provide them with notifications and fluid and medication reminders.

This transcription was edited for clarity.