Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Mar 3, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 13, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 16, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Digital patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) for remote monitoring of patients on cancer treatment: a cross-sectional questionnaire feasibility study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Oncology has increasing outpatient activity related to increased cancer incidence, better survival rates and more treatments. Innovative technological solutions could help deal with this increasing demand and digital patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to identify those patients that need a face-to-face (FTF) appointment is one potential approach.
Objective:
Our study aimed to assess the feasibility of digital PROM questionnaires to enable remote symptom monitoring for patients on cancer treatment and their ability to determine the requirement for a FTF appointment.
Methods:
This study was performed at a tertiary oncology centre between December 2018 and February 2019. Target clinics covered both systemic therapy and radiotherapy cohorts. The Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE) helped form the basis for acute toxicity questionnaires which were adapted into patient-friendly language. Treatment-specific digital PROM questionnaires were answered by patients and their clinicians alongside face-to-face appointments. Patients and clinicians did not see each other’s results, which were not used for clinical decisions. Agreement between patients and clinicians was assessed through descriptive statistics. Patient and staff feedback was also obtained.
Results:
90 patients took part in the study across 10 different treatment pathways. By comparing paired patient and clinician responses, the sensitivity of the patient-completed questionnaires in correctly determining the need for FTF review was 93.6% and no patients with severe toxicity would have been missed with the questionnaires. Digital PROMs revealed 28.9% of participating patients did not need FTF review based on their symptoms. Certain oncological treatment pathways, such as immunotherapy, were found to have a larger proportion of patients with minimal symptoms compared to others, such as conventional chemotherapy. Patient and staff feedback showed high approval with digital PROMs and their potential for use in remote monitoring.
Conclusions:
Digital PROM questionnaires can feasibly determine the need for FTF review in ‘on treatment’ oncology clinics. Their use with specific treatments could safely reduce the requirement for FTF care and future work should evaluate their application in the remote monitoring of patients.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.