A smartphone app framework for segmented cancer care coordination

Complex cancer care requires careful coordination, but resource limitations result in lack of effective coordinated follow-up services. Recent advances in smartphones offer great opportunities for better segmentation of patient populations for cost-effective, targeted care coordination and monitoring or surveillance of cancer patients. This paper presents a framework of a smartphone app that provides such risk assessment and follow-up care monitoring services. This mHealth app framework includes three functional modules: a natural language processing module based on Bayesian model to extract relevant information from free text or medical reports; a cancer risk calculator that uses support vector machine classification to assess the medical risks of cancer patients based on the information extracted; and a health care monitor that provides timely care coordination to high risk cancer patients. The experimental results validate mHealth as a reliable medical risk assessment for post-surgical cancer patients and an effective health care monitoring service for cancer care coordination.