NOKA 'Navigating Oncology Map Antwerp'

NOKA¹ is an application that focuses on providing reliable information or references and navigating the patient and their representatives throughout the landscape of well-being and healthcare services or providers in Antwerp such as physiotherapists, hairdressers, walk-in houses, … The aim of this application is to enhance selfcare management among oncology patients and their representatives by organizing the fragmented information from different, sometimes difficult to reach, information platforms into one application. The original target group are patients and their representatives, who are receiving an oncology treatment in a day hospital and are therefore at home for the rest of their treatment. However, the information given by NOKA can be serviceable for all oncology patients and their representatives, furthermore professional caregivers can benefit from the use of NOKA as well. PTOZA² assisted us in the realisation of this project. They conducted a survey aimed to define the ‘bottlenecks’ of information throughout the trajectory of an oncology patient’s treatment. The results of their survey implied that information is sparse once the treatment has started and difficult to reach when patients are not in the hospital. These findings correspond with the experience of our research-team, who are actively working with oncology patients, receiving numerous questions about the subject, leading to the fundamentals in starting this project. To address these issues, AP University assigned 7 researchers to implement NOKA in order to provide digital information and care at home. The research-team conducted several semi-structured interviews with patients and caregivers to provide useful input to create NOKA up to the needs of the users. The target group was reached through several day care hospitals in Antwerp: University Hospital Antwerp, GZA hospitals and ZNA hospitals. The results of these interviews provided both the design and content of the NOKA-application. The user-friendliness and content of the ...