People with metastatic cancer who regularly report their symptoms via a home-based electronic monitoring system experienced improved quality of life, clinical outcomes and well-being, as well as fewer emergency department visits than those who didn’t file reports. Both groups had similar overall survival rates, according to University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers and their colleagues.
The results from the national multicenter study appeared in Nature Medicine on Feb. 7.
“Doctors and nurses are often unaware of symptoms and side effects that can worsen for cancer patients between office visits, leading to complications and unnecessary suffering,” said lead author Ethan Basch, MD, MSc, the Richard M. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Medicine and chief of the Division of Oncology. “The patient-reported outcomes, or PRO, system was developed to enable patients to report their own symptoms and side effects and our study showed that PRO keeps care teams informed so that they can intervene promptly to help patients.”
The PRO-TECT randomized clinical trial was conducted in 52 community oncology practices in 26 states to assess the real-world impact of electronic PRO symptom monitoring on clinical outcomes compared to usual care.
The study enrolled 1,191 patients. To determine if symptom monitoring with the electronic PRO system improved outcomes, roughly half (593) of the patients were randomly assigned to the PRO arm and the remaining (598) were assigned to the usual care/control arm. Patients in the PRO arm could report their symptoms using a web-based program or an automated telephone system.