RICORDO-PROEM

The development of PROMs

With the project RICORDO-PROEMRehabilitation Intervention of COgnitive Resources Domain-Oriented with Patient-Reported Outcome and Experience Measures, functions within the RICORDO-DTx rehabilitation platform will be developed, in order to enhance the personalization of therapy through a wider patient’s involvement in his care path, even in its early stages.

Specifically, it is planned to digitize specificstandardized and validated self-assessment questionnaires (“Patient-Reported Outcome Measures“, PROM) such as, for example, measures assessing the perceived level of disability or quality of life in relation to one’sown health status, which will be identified after specific analysis by the Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation.

As recommended by the guidelines for the implementation of the digital home care (Ministry of Health, 2022), digitized PROMs will be administered via apps on tablets both pre- and post-intervention and in its peri-operative phases, integrating data obtained fromclinical and instrumental measures and those collected during home monitoring via thetelerehabilitation.

The aim of the project is to ensure that data obtained from digital PROMs before the start of rehabilitation contribute to a profiling of the patient in accordance with his or her specific clinical-welfare needs so that therapy can be more precisely tailored.

The data obtained from digital questionnaires completed in itinere and at the end of therapy will be used to help in the evaluation of treatment effectiveness and to refine the logic of personalization.

The digitization of PROMs will involve clinicians and patients of the Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus Foundation according to a model of co-design. Upon completion of the developments, these new features will be the subject of of a Pilot Study that will involve at-risk and mild dementia patients treated by the “Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi” clinical center in Avellino.

The project is co-founded through the Call for PNRR cascade within the ProjectTHE – Tuscany Health Ecosystem” – Spoke 10, supervised by the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa.

The project started in July 2024 and has an expected duration of 15 months.

The analysis conducted in the first phase of the project, both through a review of the scientific literature and semi-structured interviews with patients, made it possible to identify four main issues to be monitored through four PROMs.

The digitalization of the four PROMs was co-designed with the clinical experts of Fondazione Don Gnocchi, taking into account patients’ usability needs, and was eventually integrated into the RICORDO-DTx digital platform.

The completion of the PROMs by patients complements the information recorded on the platform by the neuropsychologist during the visit, enabling the calculation of a treatment profile tailored to the patient. Four profiles have been defined by Fondazione Don Gnocchi:

Starting from May 2025, the clinical pilot study of the technological solution acceptability — including the digitalized PROMs and the algorithms for calculating treatment templates — is planned, following approval by the Ethics Committee. The study will be carried out with the collaboration of participants from the clinical centers of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi in Avellino and IRCCS S. Maria Nascente in Milan. It will involve a group of individuals with mild-to-moderate cognitive disabilities and a control group composed of rehabilitation professionals.