Abstract
Background/Aims Bariatric surgery candidates often struggle when deciding between intensive lifestyle therapy, pharmacological therapy, and/or bariatric surgery for achieving their long-term weight loss (WL) goals. Moreover, they often have unrealistic WL expectations prior to surgery. Despite huge individual variation in surgically induced WL, patient education is currently based on average WL results derived from program experience or published literature. Improved patient education tools are needed to provide realistic individual expectations for surgical WL. The purpose of this study was to develop an electronic application for patient education that can aid in surgical decisions, establishing realistic WL goals, and monitoring WL success.
Methods Post-operative weight measurements from 2608 Roux-en-Y gastric bypass patients at Geisinger Clinic were collected over an eight year period. While accounting for surgical BMI and age, quantile regression was used to create expected WL curves (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th %tile) for the 36 month post-operative period.
Results A mobile application (Get-2-Goal) was designed to provide a simple, personalized interface that allows patients to track their WL and compare their WL results to their expected WL curves. Get-2-Goal was made publicly available at no cost on a popular Apps store and is compatible with current smartphone and tablet technology (>1000 downloads to date). Get-2-Goal allows patients to input their personal profile (e.g. age, BMI), review their expected WL, and track their WL post-operatively. Patients have the option of saving a graphic containing their personalized WL curves and e-mailing a tabular form of their WL results to family, friends, and/or care providers.
Conclusions Get-2-Goal is a simple tool that may be used by Bariatric Surgery Programs to facilitate electronic patient education. This tool may assist patients in deciding to proceed to WL surgery, and will facilitate early identification of patients who are struggling with WL or weight maintenance. Future modifications of this methodology can be used to personalize other comorbidity outcomes such as diabetes resolution.
