Design and development of an application for technology-supported shared decision-making in COPD

<bold>Background:</bold> Shared decision making (SDM) is not widely used in regular clinical practice and applied in only 10% of health decisions for chronic diseases. <bold>Objective:</bold> To design and develop the SDM process embedded in an eHealth application to support both the patient with COPD and comorbidities and the healthcare professional (HCP) in SDM for supporting a healthy lifestyle. Method: The ideation, specification, realization, and user evaluation phases of the Creative Technology Design Process (Mader et al., 2014) were applied to develop the eHealth application. Requirements were defined based on the 10 SDM elements defined by Clayman et al. (2012) and by focus group sessions with patients and HCPs. During the realization phase, the final concept was implemented, resulting in an eHealth application to support SDM. <bold>Results:</bold> The focus groups showed that patients (n=10) view time management, preparation, information provision, SDM roles, and goal-setting important for the SDM process. HCPs (n=21) emphasized that applications for SDM should be informative, offer guidance and support, and enable patients to have greater autonomy in making decisions. The final SDM process in the eHealth application structurally guides the HCP and patient to decide together on: (1) a health domain (e.g. physical activity), (2) a long-term goal, and (3) a performance goal based on the selected domain. <bold>Conclusion:</bold> Next, we will evaluate the application's usability through various tasks prior to application in a larger clinical trial. We hypothesize that patients and HCP can enhance their communication and collaboration by leveraging a SDM application, which could lead to more informed and patient-centred decisions.