OncoSupport+

Digital support for supportive cancer care

OncoSupport+ lets patients record outcomes and access supportive-care information. It gives nurses a structured view of those reports during consultations and brings supportive-care screening into the clinical workflow.

The app was developed in collaboration with patients with cancer, cancer survivors, and health care professionals at the University Hospital Zurich. I contributed as part of the ZHAW development team.

Co-designed around clinical use

The project followed a participatory design process with workshops, individual interviews, focus groups, scoring cards, and think-aloud usability testing. That process shaped OncoSupport+ around the people who would actually use it: patients documenting their needs and nurses reviewing that information during supportive-care consultations.

The resulting system combines two connected views:

1. Patient dashboard - records patient-reported outcome measures and provides access to personalized supportive-care information and contact details.
2. Nurse dashboard - visualizes patient data so it can be reviewed and discussed during clinical consultations.

My contribution

I worked in the ZHAW team that developed OncoSupport+. In this clinical research setting, usability, workflow fit, and clear presentation of patient-reported information mattered as much as the technical implementation.

Research output

The work was published in JMIR Human Factors as Collaborative Design and Development of a Patient-Centered Digital Health App for Supportive Cancer Care: Participatory Study.

Publication details:

• Sonia Difrancesco, Matthia Martina Bauert, Claude Lehmann, Steven Häsler, Yi Zhang, Sven Hirsch, Philipp Ackermann, Kurt Stockinger, Monika Reif, Sunjoy Mathieu, Andreas Götz, Andreas Wicki, Michael Krauthammer, and Claudia M. Witt
• JMIR Human Factors, 12(e73829), 2025
• DOI: 10.2196/73829
• ZHAW Digital Collection: 10.21256/zhaw-34638