A Patient-oriented Risk Communication Tool to Improve Patient Experience, Knowledge and Outcomes After Elective Surgery

One and a half million Canadians have inpatient surgery every year, and many experience serious complications. Research shows that patient-specific risks are not routinely or effectively communicated to patients before surgery, despite the requirement for such information to be included as part of the informed consent process, and clear recommendations from best practice guidelines. Mobile health technology can address this gap by engaging and empowering patients to provide their own health data to generate personalized risk estimates. Using a tablet-based platform, these risk estimates can then be communicated to patients in a format that is appealing and understandable. However, such an application and process do not exist. The Investigators will address this knowledge gap through the development, implementation, and evaluation of a novel patient-oriented personalized preoperative risk communication eHealth application to empower patients, support shared decision making, and improve patient-centered outcomes. Development of this eHealth application will lead to an inclusively designed product tailored to the technology needs of elective surgery patients, who are typically older, and have limited technological expertise and comfort. The application will also be useful, in that it will communicate personalized risk estimates in a format consistent with best practices for risk communication to patients, and provide tools to engage shared discussions between patients and clinicians. Through implementation of the eHealth app, the Investigators will evaluate the effectiveness and value of personalized preoperative risk communication in improving knowledge, and satisfaction. The Investigators will also measure the acceptability of this process to patients and clinicians. Finally, the Investigators will test the feasibility of having a patient-oriented personalized risk communication application connect to the perioperative health system to identify high resource use patients prior to hospital admission.