The International Observatory on End of Life Care (IOELC) is pleased to be one of the 16 partners in the MyPal project consortium, as the team leading dissemination activities. This fifth MyPal newsletter presents the progress of work on the project and recognises some challenges facing researchers and clinicians.

The newsletter focuses on the use of health apps or eHealth technologies to support the interaction between patients with cancer and their healthcare providers through electronic patients reported ouctomes (ePROs). Interactive electronic health applications such as mobile phones and tablets can be used for monitoring, delivering, and evaluating health care. The use of health apps has shown tremendous potential to improve patients and providers’ access to real-time health information, miminise health errors and delays in reporting symptoms, and improve the quality of care provided1. For example, a recent systematic review on the application of eHealth in palliative care indicates that health apps serve as a complementary remote monitoring tool, provide patient education, and guide self-management1. The potential challenges of using these apps, such as reduced physical professional-patient relationships, are further discussed later in this edition.