The eGVHD app is developed by the UZ Leuven (Belgium) in collaboration with the EBMT (European Bone Marrow Transplantation Society) Transplantation Complications Working Party and the National Institute of Health (Bethesda, USA).
It is an electronic tool designed as an algorithm-driven application, to help clinicians apply the internationally recognized criteria for the assessment of graft versus host disease (GVHD), a pleiotropic disease affecting allogeneic stem cell transplantation recipients when their transplanted stem cells react against their own body.
This app is not a medical tool aiming at replacing the diagnosis of a clinician, but a user-friendly educational tool. It helps health care professionals improve their ability to diagnose and score the severity of GVHD by showing the user differential information and making an automatic summary of what has been filled in.
The eGVHD app has been developed according to a human centered design, to ensure optimal usability. It offers several features:
- An interface to give health care professionals assistance with scoring acute GVHD (three organs involved), including optional fields reserved for research use
- An interface give health care professionals assistance with scoring chronic GVHD (eight organs involved), including optional fields reserved for research use
- A user-manual for each feature (diagnosis, scoring aGVHD and scoring cGVHD) separately
- Access to the reference scientific papers for both acute and GVHD
- Access to definition of specific medical terms and relevant medical pictures
- A progress bar to evaluate completeness of the information entered by the user
- The option of producing a report, which can be saved or printed.
The eGVHD app has a consistent layout. Regardless of the type of assistance needed (diagnosing or scoring), the user navigates between screens showing the different relevant features sorted by organs (one screen = one organ). Once all relevant fields have been filled in, the user taps the ‘calculator button’ and receives a report of the information entered with an automatic calculation of the diagnosis or score.
The eGVHD app is a mobile-friendly cross-platform web application, distributed as a normal website as well as a real mobile application. The application has no server component. It is a standalone application, completely client-side and does not involve any transfer of data. It was developed using the free and open-source framework Ionic. Ionic offers a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS CSS components, gestures, and tools for building highly interactive apps.
Several steps have been taken to ensure usability and validity of this tool (Schoemans et al., BMT 2016). You are encouraged to provide us with feedback on the eGVHD app. Please contact egvhd@uzleuven.be in case you would be interested in using the eGVHD app for other purposes than educational purposes (e.g. as part of a clinical trial or other research purposes).
The eGVHD App project was led by Helene Schoemans & Steven Pavletic. The app was developed by UZ LEUVEN with the help of many colleagues active in the field of GVHD. We want to express special thanks to ...
Our GVHD experts and advisors: Grzegorz Basak, Rafael Duarte, James Ferrara, Mary Flowers, Hildegard Greinix, Stephanie Lee, John Levine, Annie Im, Tapani Ruutu, Kirk Schultz, Bronwen Shaw, Daniel Wolff
Our development team: Sabina De Geest, Fabienne Dobbels, Kathy Goris, Jasper Vanhoof, Rafaël Van Durm
Colleagues who have provided us with pictures to illustrate GVHD concepts: Christiane Marks for skin GVHD illustrations, Agnete Brüning for ocular GVHD illustrations, Jaqueline Mays for oral GVHD illustrations
The organisations who have supported this work: EBMT, NIH-NIC, German-Austrian-Swiss cGvHD-consortium, CIBMTR
And our sponsors: SOFHEA, CRYOSTEM, HTC project