Improving Internal Medicine Residents’ Colorectal Cancer Screening Knowledge Using a Smartphone App: Pilot Study

BACKGROUND: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common type of cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. About one in three adults in the United States is not getting the CRC screening as recommended. Internal medicine residents are deficient in CRC screening knowledge. OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study was to assess the improvement in internal medicine residents’ CRC screening knowledge via a pilot approach using a smartphone app. METHODS: We designed a questionnaire based on the CRC screening guidelines of the American Cancer Society, American College of Gastroenterology, and US Preventive Services Task Force. We emailed the questionnaire via a SurveyMonkey link to all the residents of an internal medicine department to assess their knowledge of CRC screening guidelines. Then we designed an educational intervention in the form of a smartphone app containing all the knowledge about the CRC screening guidelines. The residents were introduced to the app and asked to download it onto their smartphones. We repeated the survey to test for changes in the residents’ knowledge after publication of the smartphone app and compared the responses with the previous survey. We applied the Pearson chi-square test and the Fisher exact test to look for statistical significance. RESULTS: A total of 50 residents completed the first survey and 41 completed the second survey after publication of the app. Areas of CRC screening that showed statistically significant improvement (P<.05) were age at which CRC screening was started in African Americans, preventive tests being ordered first, identification of CRC screening tests, identification of preventive and detection methods, following up positive tests with colonoscopy, follow-up after colonoscopy findings, and CRC surveillance in diseases. CONCLUSIONS: In this modern era of smartphones and gadgets, developing a smartphone-based app or educational tool is a novel idea and can help improve residents’ knowledge about CRC screening.