Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Today, over 80% of children diagnosed with cancer will survive into adulthood. With more and more children surviving, researchers want to focus on improving long-term outcomes as many childhood cancer survivors struggle with low quality of life and late effects of the harsh treatments they received. One way to do this is to ensure that survivors attend their long-term follow-up appointments although previous research has shown many survivors do not attend their appointments after transitioning from pediatric to adult care. A large barrier that survivors face to attending these long-term follow-up appointments is the lack of self-management skills. The use of digital health technologies via cell phones may be a solution to this problem as cell phones are accessible and widely used within society, particularly with this young adult age demographic.Our goal for this study is to implement a digital health tool to teach survivors about their own personal treatment via a individualized patient portal and give them access to their oncology teams via text message to ask questions during their transition from pediatric to adult care.We hope this study will improve survivors' understanding of their condition, increase their engagement in health care and self-management skills, all of which are important for attendance in long-term follow-up clinics thereby reducing the potential for late effects to go untreated.