An App for the Pap Women’s Health Goes High-Tech By RACHeL MORTON
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For 23 years, Stacy Christensen has heard just about every misconception in the book about Pap Tests. Does cervical cancer run in the family? Many women think it does, but it does not. Does a Pap screen for STDs? No, it only screens for one STD—HPV (Human Papillomavirus). Women contract that virus through unprotected sex, and 99 percent of all cervical cancer is caused by HPV. Will a Pap screen for cancer of the ovaries or the uterus? No, it only screens for cancer of the cervix. A nurse practitioner in Connecticut, Christensen has done “probably thousands” of Paps. She is also in a tenure-track teaching position at Central Connecticut State University, and she has a family— a husband and two boys, 15 and 18. So her plate is full, but she has made it even fuller. For the past two years, Christensen has been commuting to Regis to attend the DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) program. For her Capstone Project this year, she decided to address those common Pap Test misconceptions by creating an informative tool to help women understand the Pap and their gynecological health. Her teaching vehicle is not a book or an article, an infomercial or a website. It’s a mobile app. Called “MyPapp,” it helps educate women about the Pap Test and teaches them about female anatomy. It is an easy to use, interactive application that is free and can be used in the privacy of one’s own home. Christensen is by no means a computer expert, so creating an application was a difficult hurdle to surmount. But a nursing informatics class spurred her interest in the project—health informatics is all about technology and health, two fields that
are rapidly intertwining as the health profession attempts to improve patient outcomes through the use of technology. To build a computer application, most people hire programming professionals and pay many thousands of dollars to turn their ideas into applications. Christensen didn’t have those kinds of resources, so she sought help from a professor at Trinity College, Dr. Ralph Morelli, who had experience with a program called App Inventor. He helped her work her way through programming a computer application. “I never thought I could do it,” Christensen admits. “But I did it with a free program and I did it myself.” She also created the app in Spanish because in her culture class she learned that Hispanic women have a much higher chance of dying of cervical cancer. The result received immediate attention. Christensen was invited to present MyPapp at an App Inventor Summit at MIT this summer. “I’m not a computer geek so I was living proof that someone like myself could use this programing platform.” She coauthored a paper with Dr. Morelli that was accepted for publication in CIN: The Journal of Computers, Informatics, and Nursing. Christensen recently presented MyPapp in a poster presentation at the national DNP conference in St. Louis. And MyPapp was recognized among the “100 Best of 2012 Nurse Practitioner Round-Up” by the Online Nurse Practitioner Programs website. People involved with health education understand that this kind of private, personal access to sensitive health information could be of great benefit to women. For where do women learn about their bodies, about what happens in a gynecologist’s office? Some women
10/19/12 4:00 PM