Development and Assessment of a Mobile Nutritional Counseling Tool for Primary Care Physicians.

ABSTRACT

Background:Hypertension remains widely undetected, undertreated, and poorly controlled. Appropriate dietary changes can prevent and treat hypertension effectively. Primary care physicians (PCPs) have the opportunity to counsel patients about their diets and are able to facilitate long-term adherence to changes. However, they encounter several barriers to delivery of evidence-based counseling in daily medical practice. m-Health can make important contributions.Objective:To describe the development and assessment of a Brazilian mobile app for nutritional management of hypertension supported by evidence-based.Materials and Methods:App development used a user-centered approach that seeks to solve problems in a collective and collaborative way. The app was developed in Apache Cordova® (Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA) for iOS and Android mobile phone platforms. Beta testing was performed with a sample of Brazilian PCPs (n = 62), who were asked to use the app in routine practice and evaluate it.Results:The process involved researchers, government, PCPs, nutritionists, and designers. Dieta Dash® (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul-UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil) app was divided into following sections meal evaluation, Healthy meals, Healthy choices, and a database of Healthy recipes. The mean perceived usefulness and ease-of-use scores were 23.3 and 32.3 out of 42, respectively.Conclusions:It is a great source of up-to-date and summary guidelines, usable, acceptable, and positively impact clinical care. PCPs have identified improvements that could make the user experience better. The Dieta Dash app can be incorporated into Brazilian primary care practice.