EP655 - Enhancing Communication After Surgery With An App Improves Health Related Quality Of Life (HRQOL): A Randomized, Clinical Trial

Monday, May 12, 2025

8:43 AM – 8:48 AM PT

Location: Monitor 7, Sails Pavilion, Upper Level

ePoster Presenter(s)

IH

Ivy Huang, MD, MEHP (she/her/hers)

Surgery Resident
UCLA Department of Surgery
Los Angeles, CA, United States

All of the relevant financial relationships listed below have been mitigated.
This individual has no financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Author(s)

EL

Edward H. Livingston, MD

Professor
UCLA School of Medicine
Los Angeles, California, United States

Disclosure information not submitted.
KK

Kevork Kazanjian, MD

Professor of Surgery
UCLA School of Medicine
Los Angeles, California, United States

All of the relevant financial relationships listed below have been mitigated.
This individual has no financial relationships with ineligible companies.
SR

Sarah Reardon, RN, BSN

Nurse coordinator
UCLA Department of Surgery
Los Angeles, California, United States

Disclosure information not submitted.

Senior Author(s)

AL

Anne Lin, MD, MSHS

Professor of Surgery
UCLA School of Medicine
Los Angeles, California, United States

All of the relevant financial relationships listed below have been mitigated.
This individual has no financial relationships with ineligible companies.

All of the relevant financial relationships listed below have been mitigated.

Ivy Huang, MD, MEHP: This individual has no financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Kevork Kazanjian, MD: This individual has no financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Anne Lin, MD, MSHS: This individual has no financial relationships with ineligible companies.

Image or Table (Do Not add text here):

Purpose/Background: Communication between recently discharged patients and their clinicians is crucial to enhance recovery but can be difficult because of the complexity of the outpatient environment.

Methods/Interventions: Patients undergoing colorectal surgery were randomized to use a post-surgical discharge communication-facilitating app or receive usual care. PROMIS-29 was used to measure HRQOL before surgery, 1 week and 1 month after inpatient hospital discharge. HRQOL domains were compared with population norms. The difference between treated and control patient HRQOL domains was assessed by Bayes posterior probability distributions. Individual question results within PROMIS-29 were analyzed by Bayesian longitudinal proportional odds.

Results/Outcomes: Between 12/1/23 and 6/19/24, 30 patients were enrolled in the study. One week after discharge there was a 91% probability that physical function was better in app than control patients (Table). Even though pain scores were no different between groups, the impact of pain on HRQOL in app patients was significantly less than on controls (probability Pdiff>0 = 94%). Physical function was 1 SD lower and pain interference was 1 SD greater than population means, suggesting that these aspects of HRQOL are profoundly affected by surgery. App patients had less pain-related interference with day-to-day activities for 14 of 31 postoperative days relative to controls.

Conclusion/Discussion: 1) Providing postoperative patients with a communication-facilitating app significantly improved their quality of life. 2) Bayesian analysis of clinical trial data allows for continuous assessment of study outcomes with no statistical penalty for multiple views of clinical trial outcomes and vastly improves the analytic statistical power.