Guided by CIHR’s Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research and together with C. Bouchard (formal Patient Partner of the MUHC COE AD) Dr. Carolyn Jack co-founded and co-developed EczemaQ, a mobile health (mHealth) app designed to provide remote access to care and personalized medicine to adult patients living with atopic dermatitis, empowering this population through shared decision making and self-management of their disease.
The app’s validated educational content is centered around 5 common patient questions - What, Why, When, What now, and Where - with bite-sized, easily digestible educational content on atopic dermatitis. The ‘Body Map’ module gives patients the most up-to-date treatment options per body part, with information on posology and side effects. We also provide a diagnostic tool, disease tracking through the validated patient-reported outcome measure POEM, and a dedicated photo gallery and notes module. All of this is also available in French.
EczemaQ aims to improve efficiency of clinical encounters, reduce the burden of in-person knowledge translation, help patients remotely self-manage their disease, and, in the long-term, by managing disease, reduce the immense cost burden of AD. Presented in JACI: In Practice, this pilot project has REB approval, funding, and collaborators (S. Lambert, Ingram School of Nursing; Unité de Soutien SSA Québec) for validation.
The app was awarded a Canadian Dermatology Association Public Education Award and won McGill’s $50,000 Hakim Innovation Prize for Most Transformative Clinical Innovation.