Background: Smartphone applications (apps) are being increasingly utilized in the health care arena to improve patient care and outcomes.

Objective: To further demonstrate the ability of a smartphone app to improve patient compliance with preoperative instructions and to decrease the number of last-minute surgery cancellations.

Methods: Patients undergoing spine surgery were prospectively accrued. Smartphone app users were compared to non-app users. Patient adherence with preoperative instructions as well as last-minute surgery cancellations were analyzed.

Results: All 85 app users adhered to preoperative instructions according to the acknowledgements sent to the web portal, and there were no cancelled surgeries. Among the 89 non-app users, there were five cancelled surgeries (5.6%).

Conclusions: We demonstrate the ability of a smartphone application to improve patient adherence with preoperative instructions and decrease last-minute surgery cancellations.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6504025PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.4192DOI Listing

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