Designing and Developing a Mobile App: An Interprofessional Collaboration

Monday, 18 November 2019

Shuhong Luo, EdD, MSN, RN
College of Nursing, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, USA

Sexual assault or abuse of children and adolescents has severe negative effects on victims. It causes funda- mental disturbance to victims' physical, emotional, and mental development. To improve health care providers’ adherence to the clinical guidelines for child and adolescent sexual abuse postassault testing and treatment and to support providers’ decision-making processes based on each child’s or adolescent’s individual situation, we are developing a mobile application. This app is intended to provide evidence-based algorithms for providers to use as guidelines for testing and treatment for children and adolescents who are suspected of being sexually abused or assaulted. The aim of this paper is to describe the collaboration process between two team members in their work on designing and developing this mobile app.

We outline our interprofessional practices, following the collaboration model for new product development (NPD) process.The model covers five project stages: concept, plan, development, production, and launch. This model integrates product life cycle management and supply chain management, and it allows different professionals participating in NPD to be on the same page during collaboration for effective production.

We discuss the barriers to the collaboration as well as the partners’ plans to overcome them. Interprofessional collaboration requires that team members understand and respect each other's strengths and weak- nesses and build collaboration on a vulnerability-based trust; use e-collaboration tools to support environments for the effectiveness of group decision-making and the efficiency of team interaction; begin with available and cost-effective re- sources; and extend collaboration networking to external connections. Healthcare institutions would benefit from learning about the experiences of our collaboration in the design and development of a new decision-support app for healthcare providers and their patients and families.

The target end users of the app are providers who work with victims of child abuse. In the future, we want to include pa- tients and their families as end users. To make the app more patient- centered and to include a wider range of needs and preferences, we plan to involve patients and their families in the process of future app development and testing.