Is it helpful for people with advanced cancer to report their symptoms regularly? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Imagine you have advanced cancer and your doctor asks you to report your symptoms electronically, so that intervention is possible before things like pain or breathing difficulties become especially troublesome. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins describes a study where they did just that.

Nelson: They did a cluster randomized trial. They took practices where people were being taken care of, they said OK this practice is going to use this technology, so the infrastructure would work effectively because they're doing the same thing for everybody. This practice wasn't going to use it. They had people with metastatic cancer collecting patient reported outcome kind of data. They did not see any difference in the overall survival. If you look at emergency room utilization, significantly different fewer visits, fewer utilization of healthcare that's expensive and requires some logistics to get to, get up, show up and go.      :33

Nelson says he thinks this approach is well worth instituting on a widespread basis. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.