Efficacy of a Self-advocacy Serious Game Intervention

Patient-centered care (e.g., incorporating patient preferences, needs, and values into all care aspects) is an essential component of high-quality care, associated with improved patient health, well-being, treatment adherence, and care coordination. Patients cannot participate in patient-centered care if they do not have the skills to self-advocate. Self-advocacy is defined as the ability to overcome health challenges by making informed healthcare decisions, communicating effectively with healthcare providers, and gaining strength through connection to others. Our work established that self-advocacy is associated with higher quality of life, lower symptom burden, higher patient-centered care, and fewer hospital admissions and emergency visits. Self-advocacy is particularly necessary in the advanced cancer setting where patients face numerous health challenges including complex treatment decisions, multiple cancer- and treatment-related symptoms, and poor quality of life. However, many patients struggle to self-advocate because they have not previously needed these skills or do not know how to apply these skills within their cancer experience. Interventions to teach patients self-advocacy are lacking, and the few programs that exist rely on non-interactive patient education that does not leverage behavior change or educational theories. There is a critical need for theoretically grounded interventions to teach patients with advanced cancer self-advocacy skills so that they can address health challenges related to their care and experience improved outcomes.

Technology-based serious games (educational video games) allow users to vicariously engage in situations reflecting their personal experiences, receive meaningful information, and learn personally relevant skills that they can apply in real life. Serious games are an ideal platform for teaching self-advocacy skills because they use immersive, motivational elements and mechanisms to provide highly-relevant skills-training. Serious games improve patient knowledge and skills though their mechanisms of action remain unclear.

Our team developed the Strong Together intervention which teaches self-advocacy skills in a serious game platform. Patients vicariously respond to health challenges managing symptoms, communicating with providers, and managing their health and are then exposed to the positive and negative consequences of self-advocating or not, respectively. It is based on our team's self-advocacy conceptual model, grounded in behavior change and educational theories, and integrates multiple mechanisms to promote learning outcomes. Our valid, reliable self-report self-advocacy measure captures the three dimensions of self-advocacy: informed decision-making, strength through connection, and effective communication. Our pilot randomized clinical trial (RCT) of the Strong Together intervention among N=70 women newly diagnosed with advanced breast or gynecologic cancer demonstrated feasibility (82% completed 6-month surveys, 71% engaged in all intervention sessions) and intervention acceptability (97% satisfied; 90% saw it as useful).

In the current study, the investigators will test the efficacy of the Strong Together intervention compared with an enhanced care as usual group in a larger, more diverse sample of women with advanced cancer.