| Interventions |
Arm 1: The intervention will last 12 months for each participant. Teleconsulting + IBDsmart. Those allocated to the teleconsulting + IBDsmart group will be treated in teleconsulting suites in Dunstan and Queenstown for the duration of the study. Their gastroenterologist will be situated at a teleconsulting unit in Dunedin Hospital. IBDsmart is a previously developed smartphone app that contains validated disease activity indices for IBD patients that can be completed by the patient on their smartphone and sent directly to their gastroenterologist and/or IBD Nurse remotely. A profile containing the patient details is generated by the IBD Nurse and IBDsmart is downloaded to the patient smartphone. Before each teleconsulting clinic, the patient will send a symptom score from the IBDsmart app on their phone to the gastroenterology unit in Dunedin and the generated report including past scores will be uploaded to Health Connect South. Crohn disease (CD) patients will send a Harvey-Bradshaw Index (HBI) and ulcerative colitis (UC) patients will send a Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index (SCCAI). The teleconsultations will occur as often as they normally would for the patient (e.g., if the patient is normally seen by their gastroenterologist every six months, each teleconsultation will happen six monthly). Each teleconsultation will be of the normal length of an outpatient appointment (i.e. 15-30 minutes). The teleconsultations will replace normal person-to-person appointments and the content of them will be the same apart from the fact the doctor will not be sitting in the same room as the patient. |