Health behavior change theories of Interventions

This is not unusual for cancer survivors. This area of the app has two functions; one is routine screenings. Again, these came from the documents of the cancer--the children's oncology group. They are the evidence-based guidelines for AYA screening.

For example,female AYAs who had mental or chest area radiation have a startling high incidence of breast cancer as a second cancer. They need to be screened eight years after treatment or at age 25,whichever is later.


They may not know this. So again, this was an educational aspect. Eventually the children's oncology group generously allowed us the use of their help links. Here, it's probably kind of hard to see, but the help links are easily accessed. They're kind of one-page briefs,written in very plain language on a variety of late effects that may be experienced by AYAs. Many of these are available in both English and Spanish. Again, the ability to disseminate and communicate these broadly to this audience was really a very, very important thing.

We are so enormously grateful to the children's oncology group for allowing us to put these directly into the hands of the AYAs. The other element,one of the other functions with the app is encourage the survivors to develop their own survivorship plan. Actually, this is an area that's being updated in the next few weeks. We originally planned for the survivors to use a cloud-based database to log-in and create their survivorship plans,but our concerns for HIPPA compliance and Texas-specific legislations, and concerns for privacy and security changed our minds. Now what we do is we provide links to both the Live Strong and the Journey Forward plans. So, this is a screen shot from Live Strong,which they can link directly to,or they can link directly to survivorship care plans by Journey Forward.

We also wanted to have a community. Again, this is based on social behavior theory,for them to respond to. We thought about at first creating a private social network, but in the end it is like using Facebook. So the users have a Facebook page they can go to and they share information on the app and on other things. Our current utilization,remember that I had said with the app being native it's only so much information that you actually gets slim.

This is a snapshot of current utilization. We have 650 users. Fifty-three users have downloaded. I hope we have more after today. Sixty-six percent of them use the assessment. Users take an assessment on the average 2. 12 times. Some of them take it a lot more;some of them take it,never go back to it. The average user visits the app about 2. 87 times. So, kind of in summary,the AYA app is really an example I think of pragmatic research,and it's an intervention that applies evidence-based functions, and applies a number of health behavior change theories in trying to provide increased health related quality of life for AYA survivors.