Virtual Care Team Receives Pfizer Grant to Improve UCSF Cancer Patient Care
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) defines Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) as any report of the status of a patient’s health condition or health behavior that comes directly from the patient, without interpretation of the patient’s response by a clinician or anyone else. And research has shown that routine PRO assessments in patients receiving cancer treatments improve quality of life and overall survival, and reduce acute care visits.
The CDHI Virtual Care Team is currently working with the UCSF Cancer Center to implement Electronic Patient Reported Outcomes (ePROs) in the breast oncology and gastrointestinal oncology clinics.
Now, with a $150,000 grant over two years from Pfizer, the virtual care team can further improve care for patients in the UCSF Cancer Center by focusing on how ePRO can systematically and efficiently drive patient triage and clinician action, and improve patient outcomes.
While fundamental to improving care delivery for cancer patients, ePROs are currently not widely implemented in clinical practices due to technological limitations with existing tools, high platform costs, disparities in patient technological literacy, and the clinical changes necessary to integrate results into existing workflows.
The team’s goal is to promote the sustainable utilization of ePROs in clinical practice by facilitating action based on ePRO responses. With the grant, the team’s aims are to:
Create a data-informed consensus guideline outlining how ePRO symptom severity, combinations of ePRO symptoms, and ePRO symptom onset generate alerts and trigger actions by the clinical team.
Improve the automated management of mild patient-reported symptoms, create patient-facing education materials and videos that can be delivered via a digital chat interface.
Identify clinical scenarios for which high-risk ePRO responses can be automatically escalated to in-person care without requiring manual processes that may delay care.
By enabling safe, efficient, and patient-centered symptom management and triage, we hope to promote the widespread adoption of ePRO tools for the benefit of all cancer patients.