Electronic real-time assessment of patient-reported outcomes in routine care—first findings and experiences from the implementation in a comprehensive cancer center

Abstract

Comprehensive oncological treatment needs to consider disease symptoms, quality of life, preferences, and comorbidities of individual patients in a structured, standardized, and transparent way. Our findings indicate that an adaptive, self-administered electronic assessment tool for cancer patients to report a broad set of PRO can be feasibly implemented and is well accepted by patients in a realistic setting.

A Questionnaire Study to Assess the Value of the Vulnerable Elders Survey, G8, and Predictors of Toxicity as Screening Tools for Frailty and Toxicity in Geriatric Cancer Patients

“…Patients presenting at our tertiary cancer center are often diagnosed with advanced disease [24]. Stage at diagnosis depends on the respective entity, and the predominant tumor sites in this study were gastrointestinal, seldom diagnosed at a localized stage [25].…”

An Electronic Patient-Reported Outcome Tool for the FACT-B (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast) Questionnaire for Measuring the Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients With Breast Cancer: Reliability Study (Preprint)

“…There are several advantages of ePRO, such as rapid access to data, a probable avoidance of errors during data entry, and fewer missing data in comparison with paperbased surveys and the capacity to trigger alerts or notifications for answers to special circumstances 3 and an improvement in patients' willingness to report sensitive information [23,28]. Although paperbased surveys of PRO still predominate because there are only a few reliable and validated ePRO questionnaires, numerous projects have evaluated feasibility and acceptance of HRQoL in ePRO measurement in the last few years [29][30][31][32][33][34]. Nevertheless, knowledge regarding patient acceptance, feasibility, and barriers remains limited [35], especially since hurdles might exist in relation to health status, technical skills, and socioeconomic aspects, which could influence both patients´ willingness to use ePRO and their response behavior [10,36,37].…”

CORR Insights®: What is the Incidence of Suicide in Patients with Bone and Soft Tissue Cancer?

“…Large databases help to identify trends, as Siracuse and colleagues have done here. While institutions are increasingly collecting wide-ranging patientreported information in clinical practice [1,8], data collection alone will not address the elevated incidence of suicide.…”

“…Evidence from other cancers has shown that providing appropriate early palliative care interventions and support improves quality-of-life for patients with metastatic disease [4], although this has not yet translated into a lower risk of suicide, as far as we know. There is also a need for processimprovement research, which could guide us on how to organize screening programs in ways that are clinically meaningful as well as feasible [2,3,8].…”