Can older people with cancer benefit from telephone based contact? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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People who were older and had advanced cancers benefited from a telephone-based intervention designed to regularly assess their symptoms and refer them to expert clinicians, by reducing their visits to emergency departments and need for hospitalization. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins says the people who did the calling were not health professionals but the strategy clearly helped these patients.

Nelson: These would be ones we would expect treatment would be used to improve quality of life so symptoms would be very important aspect of that treatment. What was the impact of this on people going to an emergency room or getting admitted to a hospital? They did have fewer emergency department visits, 47-48% without this resource versus 31% with the resource. Reduced hospitalizations from about 40% to about 19%, reduced the total average cost by about 12,000 bucks so this was an effective intervention.  :32

Nelson believes frequency of contact is important. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.